Clinical Experiments at NLSIU: The Human Rights Lawyering Clinic

How can Indian law schools develop a robust programme of clinical education? While law clinics have existed in law schools and departments in India in various iterations through the decades, there is increasing deliberation on sustainable models to integrate clinical courses into the law school curriculum. At issue are questions of format, continuity and professionalism. In this piece, I reflect on the questions of format and professionalism through one such experiment of clinical teaching at NLSIU: the Clinical Workshop on Human Rights Lawyering in 2023-24.

In this clinic, students undertook research and advocacy on the environmental and human rights implications of a proposed bauxite mine at Sijimali in Odisha, through a scrutiny of various clearance processes for the project, such as environmental and forest clearances. Drawing from this experiment, I engage with the issue of professionalism by proffering a view of clinical legal education as a ‘public intervention’, followed by an outline of the structure adopted for its execution within the law curriculum at NLSIU. In the concluding section, I describe the infrastructural support necessary for such workshops at law schools.

Clinical education as public intervention

The clinical workshop sought to introduce NLSIU students to the rich legacy of the human rights movement in India, with an orientation into its diverse methods, strategies and interventions for accountability and redressal. The course description identified the goals of human rights lawyering as ‘harness[ing] constitutional and human rights protections to pursue socio-political change through Law within an overall hostile and exclusionary legal system’. The clinical workshop lay equal emphasis on the constitutional commitment to fundamental rights, as on separation of powers and federalism.

Such a view decentres the role of courts as the site of legal intervention, and opens up a wide network of institutional actors and processes within the legislature, executive and wider civil society where the law is routinely enacted and practised. The Indian legal system rests on a highly muscular executive that not only enforces law but also enjoys a high degree of lawmaking powers. Laws relating to land, mining and the environment exemplify these powers, where the field is governed by a proliferation of rules, notifications, guidelines, policies, circulars, office orders, etc., that emerge under the Forest (Conservation) Act 1980, the Environmental Protection Act 2006, among others.

Human rights lawyering is anchored in the democratic practice of the law. It upholds the agency of people—not as subjects of the law and legal system, but as being integral to the processes by which legal authority is enacted, exercised and held accountable. It also makes available a wider toolkit of actionable legal strategies to those otherwise not qualified for courtroom practise under the Advocates Act, such as students.

An important learning insight for students was thus to structure interventions in a manner that is embedded in, and overall accountable to, the democratic public. We adopted the strategy of knowledge production around human rights violations through investigations and advocacy, which can then aid in mobilising the wider public to seek redressal and accountability. Here, in the absence of professional qualifications, ethical standards for practise were drawn through overall accountability to the university internally, and to social movements externally.

Thus, the imperative motivating this clinical workshop on human rights lawyering was certainly one of building skills and capacities through experiential learning among students. Equally, it was one of making a ‘public intervention’. Such an approach immerses students in an action-oriented praxis of law to seek redressal and accountability for human rights violations through public engagement. Here, ‘public’ may refer to public authorities entrusted with powers and functions of providing redressal, or the wider democratic public as the holder of rights, capable of mobilising for political accountability. In this manner, clinical education can help realise both the pedagogic goals of a public university and its democratic goals as a civil society institution.

Structure of the clinic

The Human Rights Lawyering Clinic was conducted over two phases. The first phase (November 2023-January 2024), attended by 26 students, was offered as a workshop-style elective as part of the official curriculum of the BA LLB, LLB and LLM programmes. Our intervention at the clinic was conducted in close cooperation with local organisations involved in mobilising around the bauxite mine, particularly the Ma Mati Mal Surakhya Manch. The class undertook primary and secondary research, which included a detailed scrutiny of project-related documents prepared by the project proponent, state authorities and independent consultants involved through the environmental and forest clearances of the proposed mine [such as the draft Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA), and draft Conservation Management Plan (CMP), Collector’s reports on public hearings and gram sabha proceedings, etc.]. Students also examined the documentation of independent accounts by affected communities, media and civil society organisations, and primary legal materials such as FIRs and bail orders. This was supplemented by secondary research on the environmental and social impacts of bauxite mines elsewhere in the world.

The second phase (February to April 2024) included a smaller team of eight students on a voluntary basis. This phase was not part of the official curriculum. The aim here was to draft, edit and release the report, and conduct further advocacy based on its findings. This included more supplementary research and fact-checking, re-drafting and editing the report, organising a public launch event, and writing blog posts for the wider dissemination of advocacy efforts. The report, titled Under the Surface: Environmental and Human Rights Implications of the Proposed Bauxite Mine at Sijimali, Odisha, was released at the NLSIU campus on 12 April 2024, along with a photo exhibition by Rajaram Sundaresan of the Ma Mati Mal Surakhya Manch.

The first phase was conducted over forty hours across ten weeks as an ‘orientation to goals and methods of human rights lawyering, and appl[ying] these tools and strategies towards active interventions in contemporary human rights concerns’. It was structured along two prongs, with one class per week devoted to each. The ‘Methods’ prong offered instruction through class deliberation and case studies on perspectives and methodologies of human rights lawyering. Students were introduced to three core human rights strategies: investigating violations (through fact-finding and documentation), seeking redress (through judicial, quasi-judicial, administrative and democratic institutions), and advocacy and public awareness.

The ‘Interventions’ prong was, as the name suggests, structured around the ‘problem’ where the Clinic was to intervene. In this case, this meant assessing the potential environmental and human rights implications of the proposed Sijimali bauxite mine in Odisha. The class was divided into three teams. The Legal Desk was responsible for research on the fast-mutating international and domestic legal frameworks pertaining to land, forests, environment, mining and human rights, and fielding legal queries from other teams. The Legal Processes team monitored the passage of the proposal through the various clearance processes mandated by law that were underway at the time, and scrutinised the project proposal along with other official documents on the Parivesh website. The EIA team scrutinised the draft EIA report and CMP, and undertook secondary research on the impact of mining on environment and communities globally. Each of the teams, internally divided into domain-specific groups, worked on weekly targets, which were then reported to the plenary for accountability and review through weekly review meetings.

The ‘Interventions’ prong commenced with two weeks on methodology, where the teams were offered a crash course on land and environment laws through a guest lecture by environmental lawyer Stella James, and another on navigating the Parivesh website by human rights lawyer Shalini Gera. Based on the briefs given to each team, they prepared questionnaires and templates for research over the course of the workshop, all of which were reviewed and finalised at the plenary. At an advanced stage of the workshop, as the teams prepared to formulate their findings and begin drafting the report, I conducted a week-long writing workshop on identifying, formulating and reporting findings. This was not originally imagined as a separate component of the Clinic, but was a response to needs emerging from the review meetings.

Integrating law clinics into the curriculum

Presently, clinical courses are part of the mandatory BCI curriculum for law universities across the country. Most of these offer opportunities for students to develop specific skills—such as ADR, litigation and advocacy—within the confines of the classroom. They do not encompass an imagination of clinical education as ‘public intervention’, which remains in the domain of individual law faculties to develop autonomously.

There are three components to a law clinic: theoretical instruction, skills training, and project implementation. This requires continuous participation by students for six months to a year, depending on the intensity of the project intervention. At NLSIU, this implies the option of a clinic being made available to students through two to three interlinked courses across trimesters, instead of as a solitary elective.

Within the university curriculum, clinics also require linkages with other courses and centres relevant either to the subject matter or skills. For instance, the Human Rights Lawyering Clinic would have benefitted from collaborating with The Writing Centre at NLSIU to train students in writing. Other clinics engaged in legal aid may benefit from collaborations with faculty offering courses on procedure, or litigation and advocacy.

Independently, clinics require infrastructural support from the university administratively, for funding, and for ethical reviews. Ethical reviews enable frameworks of internal oversight and accountability of the intervention to stakeholders within the university. Finally, the clinic must continuously strive to build legitimacy with civil society and the wider public through regular reporting, and ensuring quality and relevance of their interventions.

The report of the Human Rights Lawyering Clinic, Under the Surface: Human Rights and Environmental Implications of Proposed Bauxite Mine in Sijimali, Odisha is available here. More information on the Human Rights Lawyering Clinic is available here.

About the Author

Radhika Chitkara is Assistant Professor of Law at NLSIU, Bengaluru.

Image credit: Rajaram Sundaresan.