Introduced by Gerald Lopez in 1992, rebellious lawyering is a legal practice stressing community involvement instead of only client representation in a conventional sense. It uses grassroots campaigning to try to empower underprivileged communities. Rebellious lawyering in Bangladesh is more about reconsidering legal practice and education than about client representation. It exhorts law students to engage in community service addressing structural problems instead than only representing litigants. Closely related to this idea is anti-generic learning, which seeks to question the colonial past in legal education. It encourages a bottom-up approach, therefore guiding future attorneys to use their legal education to grasp and solve social issues. The rebellious concept of lawyering is working with different allies, including professionals and community members, to properly handle problems of subordination and discrimination. Other countries have adopted this strategy as a means of streamlining the judicial system and supporting community-based campaigning.
Professor Dr. Mizanur Rahman, Director, Centre for Advanced Legal Studies (CALS) of the Faculty of Law, University of Dhaka and Former Chairman, National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) brought anti-generic learning into Bangladesh in his book named “Anti- Generic Learning and Rebellious Lawyering: Reflections on Legal Education in Bangladesh” to challenge the rigorous and conservative legal education system. Dr. Mizanur Rahman developed the concept of “rebellious lawyering,” i.e., the use of law to empower the poor, which seeks to bring a shift from top to bottom of our conventional legal school program.
Nevertheless, for a number of reasons, the present legal education in Bangladesh is incompatible with anti-generic learning. First of all, the present legal education in Bangladesh is incompatible with the present legal system, lacks a well-defined theoretical framework, has not undergone thorough testing, lacks the scientific design required for its implementation, and is not in line with present norms.
Over a ten-day period, ELCOP, Empowerment Through Law of the Common People, arranges the Human Rights Summer School (HRSS), teaching to a small number of students the ideas of anti-generic learning and rebellious lawyering. HRSS guides students in overcoming the difficulty of implementing laws in a culture rife with discrimination and prejudice.
By using the strongest instrument for power, money, anti-generic learning lets lawyers, judges, jurists, and all other legal professionals question the legacy of colonialism in Bangladesh. Legal education should aim to establish an atmosphere that supports intellectual capacity to grasp society and human conditions in a dynamic social structure as well as personality development. Many times, graduating with theoretical knowledge of several substantive laws, Bangladeshi law students lack awareness of socioeconomic and political aspects impacting their application, interpretation, and comprehension of these laws. Lack of a clinical or multidisciplinary approach in legal education results in prejudices and poor knowledge of non-legal procedures. Although they disparage the whole law school faculty, lawyers in Bangladesh often thank their seniors or professional mentors for their professional development.
The Legal Education Committee of the Bangladesh Bar Council has mainly disregarded the efforts of ELCOP activities, which have been appreciated regionally. Many legal academics have little knowledge of clinical teaching, and traditionalist law professors oppose a pro-poor or non-traditionalist style of legal education. The colonial legacy of giving barristers precedence over advocates and the popularity of costly UK law programs only available to wealthy families in Bangladesh have produced elite lawyers who are dangerously ignorant of the difficulties faced by the poor in negotiating the justice system and indifferent to their needs. The particular teacher, student, and legal service provider determines how legal education is distributed, received, and applied finally. The long-standing, elitist, income-oriented legal system cannot be adequately addressed in a ten-day curriculum. With an eye of producing 200 rebellious lawyers and judges over 20 years, Professor Dr. Mizanur Rahman presents the “Arithmetic Dream” to question the four-year conservative legal school program in Bangladesh. But given personal decisions and the lack of a clear structure, the influence of this program is doubtful to be notable.
Programs for human rights education, including HRSS, Street Lawyering for the common people, and CLR (Community Law Reform), have not been extensively tested to find how well they encourage anti-generic learning and rebellious lawyering. Whereas the SL lacks a monitoring mechanism to track graduates’ application of newly learned information and skills, the HRSS concentrates on personal degrees of change. We have not methodically tracked and assessed the anti-generic learning, attitude modification, and rebellious postures of ELCOP alumni. By bringing law students to the legal deprivations of underprivileged Bangladeshis, CLR seeks to affect change on a group basis. These programs remain one-time interactive events for law students; however, their efficacy is not well known. Anti-generic learning has been applied for rebellious lawyering only in ELCOP programs, mostly in a non-clinical environment inside the HRSS curriculum. Until several institutions and sites can implement the approach, there is no experimentation, consolidation, or modification.
Legal education should aim to transform students’ personalities and improve their intellectual capacity so they may grasp changes in society and personal circumstances. This is establishing surroundings fit for both personal and professional development. It should concentrate on enabling pupils to work with low-income areas instead of only on their behalf. This strategy helps one to better grasp the legal requirements of underprivileged groups. Legal education ought to inspire students to challenge the current quo and grasp the dynamics of money and power inside the legal system. Development of rebel lawyers who can fight for justice depends on this critical viewpoint. We should reorganize the curriculum so that modern society’s requirements take front stage instead of colonial education. This covers including into the legal training program community-based activism and human rights education. These elements will help Bangladesh’s legal education better equip its students to fulfill the demands of the legal profession and properly service their communities.
Founder of American clinical legal education David Barnheizer underlined that teaching law students the meaning and relevance of professional responsibility is one of the objectives of the program. Although anti-generic learning for rebellious lawyers seeks to forward this objective, constraints and obstacles will always exist, therefore hindering its full potential. In essence, even if finishing two decades of antigeneric learning through ELCOP symbolizes the preparedness of new legal students and professors in Bangladesh for difficulties, it is imperative to break barriers and inspire rebellious attorneys to become real social engineers. Rebellious lawyering should be done for everyone in every sphere of life, not just the underprivileged people alone.
About the Author :
Miraz Hossain Chowdhury is a first-year LL.B. student at the University of Chittagong, Bangladesh, with a strong passion for research and writing. His commitment to excellence has earned him significant accolades, including the Silver Award in the Queen’s Commonwealth Essay Competition and the Runner-Up title in the Immerse Education Essay Competition for two consecutive years. He also holds a Silver Award in the International IQ Genius Olympiad and was the second runner-up in Bangladesh’s National IQ Olympiad. Additionally, Miraz is a recipient of the prestigious national President Scout Award. Miraz is also an active writer for national dailies and blogs.