In November 2025, my team qualified for the Vis East Commercial Arbitration Moot in Hong Kong—an achievement that should have marked an academic milestone. Instead, it triggered an administrative scramble. Our institution had no designated policy or budget to support international moot participation, and institutional and logistical constraints prevented any faculty adviser from accompanying us. Days before the registration deadline, when withdrawal seemed inevitable, ArbitralWomen, an international organisation promoting diversity in dispute resolution, stepped in to finance our entry.
While teams from Singapore and India arrived with university grants and faculty advisers, we arrived on foreign goodwill. That contrast was instructive. It revealed an uncomfortable reality about Nepal’s five-year BA LLB programme: an academic framework that has grown comfortable collecting tuition while remaining indifferent to the practical preparation of its students.
The deeper problem lies in how law is taught. This July, during a course at the Paris Arbitration Academy in France, Professor Kamalia Mehtiyeva of Sciences Po Law School opened a lecture with a clear premise: “There are no bad questions—and no single right answer in law. I am here to address your curiosity, and you have the right to critique me even as I lecture.” That principle should be the baseline of legal education. Yet in many Nepali law faculties, questioning an instructor or challenging an orthodox reading of a statute is still treated as an act of insolence. Classrooms prioritise passive transcription over critical analysis, producing graduates trained to recite statutory provisions rather than interrogate them.
Nepal’s current five-year framework must either undergo sweeping structural reform or be replaced with an intensive four-year professional degree anchored in critical thinking, research and clinical training. Any such transition must guarantee teach-out arrangements and credit protections for enrolled students. When legal training fails, the cost is ultimately borne by the public, whose access to justice depends on the competence of the bar.
The Tuition-Transparency Problem
In the United States, law school tuition is tied directly to instructional workload. At George Washington University, for example, JD students pay either a flat full-time rate or by the credit hour, establishing a clear link between cost and classroom delivery. In Nepal, universities charge flat annual fees without disclosing how those figures correspond to teaching hours, tutorial supervision, clinical training or campus facilities.
The academic calendar makes this lack of clarity harder to justify. A typical year in Nepal includes 104 weekend days (52 Saturdays and 52 Sundays), alongside roughly 35 public holidays and recurring, unplanned government closures. These interruptions do not automatically make tuition illegitimate, but they raise an unavoidable question: how many effective instructional hours do students actually receive for their money?
12,000 students admitted for LLB first year
A five-year degree is defensible only if it delivers proportional academic depth. Curricular comparisons suggest otherwise. Bright Vision Law College, affiliated with Purbanchal University, lists 36 subjects across its five-year integrated law programme. By contrast, the Nepal College of Information Technology, affiliated with Pokhara University, schedules 48 subjects across a four-year civil engineering degree. While engineering demands different laboratory contact hours, the disparity illustrates how Nepal’s law degree may be stretched over five years rather than deepened. Non-law subjects such as economics and sociology are treated as isolated introductory courses rather than integrated into legal doctrine through applied disciplines such as the Economic Analysis of Law.
This lack of institutional investment is equally visible in advocacy competitions. When student teams qualify for international moots, universities routinely leave them to crowdfund their travel, accommodation and entry fees. Globally, leading law schools view mooting as an essential component of clinical training. Nepali universities must follow suit by establishing dedicated moot court funds.
Regional Benchmarks and Institutional Inertia
Regional examples show how deliberate regulatory oversight can transform legal training. Bangladesh formally established university-level legal education in 1921, fifteen years after Nepal’s early modern legal training began. Yet Bangladesh has produced internationally recognised jurists and scholars, including former Chief Justice Md. Tafazzul Islam, constitutional architect Dr. Kamal Hossain and Khatun Sapnara, who became the first person of Bangladeshi origin to be appointed to the English bench. Stagnation cannot be defended on the grounds of a late historical beginning.
Singapore provides an equally instructive model. The Singapore Institute of Legal Education (SILE), working alongside the Ministry of Law and the judiciary, conducts ongoing curricular reviews to align university training with international commercial practice. There, experiential learning starts early: the Singapore Judicial Service and the Attorney-General’s Chambers offer research clerkships and internship opportunities to law students as early as their first year.
In Nepal, institutional change is far slower. In the current 2083 BS academic year, integrated law programmes under Purbanchal University continue to operate on a curriculum last revised in 2075 BS, with formal, credit-bearing internships concentrated almost entirely in the final year. By delaying practical training and neglecting rapidly evolving disciplines such as technology regulation, artificial intelligence governance and international commercial arbitration, the current framework risks producing graduates unprepared for contemporary legal practice.
The licensing schedule reflects the same institutional inertia. I completed my final BA LLB examinations in December 2025. With the Nepal Bar Council’s advocate examination schedule now published for this December, my cohort will have waited an entire year simply for the opportunity to sit for the bar examination. That means twelve months of enforced professional limbo, postponing graduates’ earning potential and delaying their courtroom apprenticeship without adequate administrative justification.
India has addressed this bottleneck through regulatory intervention. In January 2026, the Bar Council of India informed the Supreme Court that the All India Bar Examination (AIBE) would be held twice a year and that final-semester law students would be permitted to sit for the examination before graduation. Nepal’s Bar Council must adopt a similar, predictable testing calendar.
Unregulated Expansion
The scale of Nepal’s law school system makes reform urgent. According to Edusanjal, as of June 2026, 55 institutions in Nepal offer undergraduate law degrees, including both BA LLB and LLB programmes, with 15 concentrated in Kathmandu District alone. Furthermore, Nepal Bar Council records from September 2026 show 23,752 registered advocates—18,135 men and 5,617 women.
Expanding legal education improves access, but without strict faculty standards, functional libraries, research supervision and clinical legal aid infrastructure, it risks reducing legal education to a credentialing exercise rather than rigorous professional training. The strength of the legal system depends not on the number of certificates issued but on the intellectual and ethical rigour of the advocates who enter the courts.
Four Reforms for Immediate Implementation
To build a professional legal education system, universities, the Nepal Bar Council and the judiciary should enact four structural changes.
First, Nepal must transition to a concentrated four-year professional degree. The Ministry of Education and university faculties should eliminate redundant survey courses while integrating interdisciplinary subjects—including constitutional history, legal philosophy and the Economic Analysis of Law—directly into legal doctrine. Any transition must protect currently enrolled students through guaranteed teach-out arrangements and recognised credit transfers.
Second, universities must institutionalise biennial syllabus audits. A joint curricular review committee comprising law school deans, Supreme Court justices, Bar Council representatives, senior advocates and student representatives should be mandated to update syllabi every two years to reflect rapid developments in data protection, artificial intelligence, international arbitration and environmental law.
Third, faculties must integrate clinical training and mooting from the first year. Rote, memory-based examinations should be replaced by continuous evaluation based on legal drafting, problem-solving and statutory interpretation. Practical exercises, including legal aid clinics, client counselling and court observation, must begin immediately. Universities should appoint clinical education coordinators and allocate dedicated funding for teams that qualify for international competitions.
Finally, universities and professional regulators must be held strictly accountable. Law schools must publish complete academic calendars, syllabi, minimum contact hours, faculty credentials and itemised fee schedules before admissions open each year. Concurrently, the Nepal Bar Council must publish a binding annual calendar and conduct the advocate licensing examination at least twice a year, allowing final-semester students to sit for the examination before graduation.
Nepal does not lack capable law students; it lacks an educational structure designed to cultivate them. Students should not have to rely on foreign sponsors to represent their universities abroad, nor should graduates lose an entire year waiting for a licensing examination. The time for non-binding consultative seminars is over. The BA LLB must be comprehensively reformed—or replaced with a system fit for professional practice.
(The author is a law graduate of Kathmandu School of Law.)
