Judges who don't know local laws well

The New Straits Times

GEORGE TOWN: Constitutional law expert Shad Saleem Faruqi has expressed shock that a person can be called to the Bar or be appointed as judge without studying local laws.

Shad Saleem said the current practice enabled one to be called or appointed without undergoing a "bridging course" or studying the Malaysian Constitution. 

"Almost 90 per cent of all superior court judges and most of the senior members of the Bar are trained abroad.

"They are not familiar with Malaysian constitutional jurisprudence and often evade constitutional issues," Shad Saleem said yesterday at the International Conference on Decolonising Universities, jointly organised by Universiti Sains Malaysia and Citizens International.

He was speaking on "Western Intellectual Imperialism in Malaysian Legal Education" on the second day of the three-day conference, which began on Monday.

He noted that the country's judges often quoted from the unwritten English constitution and reject the ones from countries like India on constitutional law matters.

On a related matter, he said legal education, apart from being just a study of rules and procedures, must also involve service to the society.

Among the ways he proposed were: redesigning the curriculum to provide for mandatory faculty and student involvement in legal aid and advice clinics; a clinical legal education course involving field work to examine how the law actually works in society; and the formulating and conducting of tailor-made, short-term courses for targeted groups.