Law School Is Breaking Us

India’s legal education system is producing top lawyers but unsettling young minds in the process. A student insider reveals what's going wrong.

- Faizan Fayaz

I didn’t think law school would make me feel smaller.

I walked in excited, maybe even a little smug, thinking I'd landed among the country’s sharpest minds. And I had. But I hadn’t prepared for the weight of silence, the kind that grows in hostel corridors, in back benches, in the long, tired eyes of students pretending they're okay.

I’ve been a student representative for years now. That means I’ve had more conversations in stairwells and hostel rooms than I've had in classrooms. I’ve watched brilliant classmates slowly fade out. First missing breakfast, then lectures, then whole days.

Once, I found a student sitting alone in a dark room. He was shaking. When I asked what was wrong, he just said, “I can’t take it anymore.” He wasn’t talking about one bad day. He was talking about everything.

We're made to sit through marathon lectures, six hours straight, barely a pause. Professors drone on while we're expected to process complex judgments and legal theory like machines.