Legal Profession under Charter of 1774

For the first time in this whole story, a court in India was told, in writing, exactly what an advocate was and was not, and given the power to say who was allowed to be one. That single clause in the Charter of 1774 is the moment the Indian legal profession stops being an unregulated free-for-all and starts becoming a profession a court can actually govern.

In two minutes

Clause 11 of the Charter of 1774 empowered the newly created Supreme Court at Calcutta to approve, enrol and remove advocates and attorneys, giving India its first real regulatory power over the legal profession — though that power was defined narrowly, in terms borrowed directly from England.

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