Pune students confused over need for handwritten journals in law colleges

While most law institutes moved to digital submissions especially during the pandemic, students of law colleges like ILS and some others have to maintain hand-written journals that usually run in to 40 pages.

“This semester we were expected to write memorandums as one part of the submission among other things,” said one of the final year students of the integrated LLB programme at ILS. She also explained that memorandums include everything like the clause title, the provision which prescribes the court’s jurisdiction to hear that matter, the statement of facts, issues, arguments, case citations and prayer.

“When you actually visit courts, you will hardly come across a handwritten draft of a petition or a memorandum. So it is quite unreasonable and illogical since you are basically wasting a lot of energy in something that you will never actually do,” she addded.

Atharva, a third year student of Firodia Law College said, “There is simply no provision for any digital submissions whatsoever for LLB or BA LLB students. Everything needs to be handwritten even though courts have actually moved to the typed format and almost everything is digital.”

A final year LLB student, whose journal was over 50 pages this semester, said, “These journals comprise of various components like moot courts, observed trials, client counselling, etc. All of this carries 20 marks. We did ask our teachers why we do not make these digital submissions but we were told that the college needs to keep these journals in case of any future inspections. Our teachers admitted that National Law Universities do not impose this anymore and allow for digital submissions.”

A student of Balaji Law College, who has written assignments as long as 70-80 pages, said, “Researching various complex legal topics, balancing numerous extracurricular and academic responsibilities, along with this tedious task of physically writing out such long assignments just leads to burnout and stress for us.”

For the administration of these colleges, making students do hand-written submissions is one of the ways to deal with blatant copy-pasting or plagiarism as well as the use of artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT.

Principal of ILS Law College Deepa Paturkar said, “With AI tools like ChatGPT and plenty of information online, students tend to simply copy paste their submissions. We want them to actually interact with people when they are attending trials, take notes when teachers are lecturing in class and while I appreciate all the digital advancements, writing by hand is essential for all these skills to be cultivated.”

Students pointed out that this is neither correct nor a fool-proof strategy, as they could still well end up copying either from each other or just from the internet. Paturkar however argued, “We try giving subjective scenarios and cases so students cannot always find that on the internet. More importantly, hand writing is important because before these students enter the professional world, they do need to pass three-hour long hand written examinations.

Without any writing practice, it is impossible to form coherent answers and arguments with any proper structure and flow. We have been noticing ourselves how these skills among students are deteriorating.”