Legal profession in Pre-British India

Before there was a bar exam, before there was even a bar, there were still people standing beside litigants in courts across India, speaking on their behalf. They were not lawyers in any sense you would recognise from a law school lecture — and understanding exactly why not is the point of this topic.

In two minutes

In pre-British India, justice was administered by Mughal courts, ruling chiefs and zamindars applying religious and customary law with no formal legal training or regulated bar, and the class of people called vakils acted more as agents for their principals than as professional lawyers in the modern sense.

The rest of this chapter

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