Why Law Fails to Be Therapeutic in Spite of Therapeutic Judicial Efforts: A Critical Analysis of Indian Legal Education From the Therapeutic Jurisprudence Perspective

Abstract

With the recent upsurge of Me-too movement (through which women from especially from entertainment industry including the cine industry, the newspaper industry, etc., are coming up to share their sexual harassment experiences at workplaces), protests against women’s right to enter into specific religious places in spite of the order of the apex court, wide violation of human rights of people belonging to LGBT group in spite of bringing into laws and policies for LGBT rights and assurance by the apex court for upholding the rights of the members of the said group and continuous infringement of data privacy in spite of creation, re-creation and over-creation of laws, policies and guidelines, it becomes necessary to review the lacuna of penal laws. The Supreme Court of India in recent time has passed several therapeutic judgments in all the above mentioned issues. The central as well as provincial governments have also brought in several laws and policies in these regards. But implementation of the same seems to be a herculean task for the law enforcement departments. This paper argues that this gap of creating laws, pronouncing landmark therapeutic judgments etc may remain paper tigers only unless the Indian law schools introduce innovative clinical legal education courses based on the principles of Therapeutic Jurisprudence: these could be Therapeutic and preventive lawyering, Therapeutic counseling by law students, etc., as have been introduced in many US, European and Australian law schools. Law students must also be introduced to process of drafting therapeutic laws and amending laws to discard anti-therapeutic parts of the laws.

Keywords: Therapeutic Jurisprudence, Therapeutic Lawyering, Legal Education, Me-Too Movement, Gender Harassment