Bar council asks law colleges to add new criminal laws, mediation in curriculum

The Bar Council of India (BCI), the nation's apex regulator for legal education, has asked centres of legal education (CLEs) to align the curriculum with new criminal laws enacted in July this year, the ministry of law and justice informed the Lok Sabha on Friday in a written submission.

The BCI had written to CLEs, which include national law universities as well as private law colleges across the country, to train students to use the new criminal laws, passed by Parliament in late 2023 and enforced on 1 July.

The three new criminal laws—the Bharatiya Nyay Sanhita (BNS), Bharatiya Nyay (Suraksha) Sanhita (BNSS) and the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam (BSA)—have replaced the Indian Penal Code, which defined punishments for all crimes, Code of Criminal Procedure, which described the prosecution procedure, and the Evidence Act, which details the process of evidence gathering, respectively.

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The new criminal laws have been tweaked to allow the use of technology in criminal prosecution, among other changes. For instance, the police can record a video of the crime scene with a camera under the new criminal laws.

The BCI wrote to the heads of all CLEs in May, asking for a change in the curriculum to include new criminal laws focusing on emerging domains such as blockchains, electronic discovery, cybersecurity, robotics, artificial intelligence, and bio-ethics.

Emphasis on mediation

The regulator also mandated universities and colleges to include training of mediation, which is an out-of-court dispute resolution method, in the legal curriculum, according to the letter.

To be sure, alternative dispute resolution has been covered in law schools across the country as a compulsory subject.

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The training, however, is commonly focused on arbitration through lectures about the Arbitration and Conciliation Act but not on mediation, according to law students.

The central government passed the Mediation Act in 2023. The Centre is also expected to create the Mediation Council of India to state the rules of procedure to be followed in mediation proceedings by the end of this year, Mint reported in June.

The BCI has also asked CLEs to follow bilingual methods of instruction to make legal education more accessible across various regions of the country.

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The BCI conducts surprise inspections at CLEs to verify whether the institutions are following the rules of legal education and penalises institutions that fail to do so. The BCI has barred seven institutions from taking new students in the 2024-25 academic year and for subsequent years until further notice, as per information on its website.