Devan Ramachandran, J.

Shorn of all embellishments, as are often added, the fundamental purpose of legal education is to train women and men and make them ready and capable of the legal profession. Law Universities and Colleges around the world are making climacteric reforms in the concatenated ways in which they prepare law students for practise and to introduce them to the immense possibilities of the legal profession to effect and address every facet of human life. Law students are being increasingly trained to use legal thinking in the complexity of actual legal practise and to focus on astuteness in legal analysis complemented by ethical and social skills.

2. Legal science is the most important catalyst of a sound legal policy, as it is specifically here that legal ideology as a social institution is formed. The foundations that we build today in legal education will define the quality of our polity tomorrow. The question of judicial education requires careful nurture with new elements and developments in line with modem and dynamic society.

3. Unseen forces in the world are propelling transformation in the legal profession. A riptide of the 21st century social and economic trends - ascending of Information Technology, globalisation of economic activity and increasing integration of knowledge - have already, unbeknownst to many, radically changed the way legal education is looked at. However, tragically many of our law universities and colleges have been reluctant partners in this change.

4. However, there is no dearth of critics of contemporary legal education in India and Kerala is often no better. Many experts and legal specialists are inclined to believe that legal education in Kerala is enduring a very serious crisis.

5. Time has come to rethink how we prepare our young lawyers for the future and for the profession. The necessity of improvement is dictated by time and realities to which we no longer can afford to be myopic. Law Colleges have to be ultimately collaborative, diverse, international, technologically attuned to the times and entrepreneurial. Law Colleges have to be set on a trajectory to the future - whether they like it or not - pulled along by the restless and worried students they service and the legal and judicial systems they feed. The wheels are in spin and law colleges have to change to fit the times.

6. We have begun this judgment fully being aware that no amount of rhetoric can ultimately drive change unless affirmative and qualitative fortitude is exhibited by the framers of legal education to immediately accord singular and primary thought to the concerns of the students and the maladies which have afflicted legal education in Kerala. The facts of this case, as we will set out below, exhibit the sheer exasperation of the student community in the perfunctory manner in which some of our Universities and Colleges handle legal education, which have impelled them to come knocking to the doors of this Court.

7. The appellants in this appeal are students of three year LL.B. Course studying in the Government Law College, Calicut, which is affiliated to the University of Calicut. They had filed the writ petition in a very peculiar and diacritic situation, relevant to a time at which it was filed. They had approached the learned Single Judge challenging a notification issued by the University of Calicut scheduling regular/supplementary examinations of the IX Semester 0 BBA, LL.B. (five year), IX Semester LL.B. (five year) and V Semester LL.B. (three year) to commence from 25.05.2016. The appellants had impugned that notification, a copy of which is produced as Exhibit P5 in the writ petition, essentially on the ground that the third respondent Law College had not been able to even attain the mandatory minimum number of working days as is b prescribed under the Rules of Legal Education, 2008 ('the Rules' for brevity) before the examinations for the relevant semesters were to commence. The appellants re