COMMENT | Tertiary legal institutions should enhance legal training quality

COMMENT | The Malaysian Bar refers to a letter published in Malaysiakini recently, titled Law graduates unprepared for pupillage?

Just as legal skills evolve with the course of time, so too should its education and training. Traditional law schools must therefore provide a legal education that consists of crucial skills, such as creative solutions to solving legal problems, and a focus on both academic and practical training.

While the Malaysian Bar appreciates that a thorough and detailed knowledge of such practical skills can only be acquired during pupillage or while practising as lawyers, we are nevertheless of the view that the learning and understanding of such basic concepts must be inculcated during the legal education of law students during their tertiary education.

Law school curricula must be tailored in such a way, to avoid merely regurgitating legal principles in examinations, without the students actually understanding their practical applications.

However, it is neither true nor fair to simply assume that all public and private universities are producing below par law graduates...