History of Legal Profession

A vakil in a Mughal court was closer to an agent running errands for his principal than to a lawyer arguing a case. An advocate today can walk into the Supreme Court of India and be heard as of right, anywhere in the country, under one common roll. Between those two people stands two hundred years of English trading company practice, half a dozen Acts, and one committee report after another — and this topic is the map of that whole journey.

In two minutes

The Indian legal profession grew from an unorganised body of agent-like vakils under Mughal and Company rule into a single, unified, autonomous profession of Advocates under the Advocates Act, 1961, through a long sequence of charters and statutes that this module's remaining topics examine one at a time.

The rest of this chapter

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