In AI age, do you need a classroom in a law school? The answer may lie in Jean-Paul Sartre

The Supreme Court’s stay on Delhi HC order on class attendance is welcome. It is not a victory for compulsory attendance, but it is an opportunity to reopen a conversation that legal education urgently needs

By Adithya Variath

Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea is, on one level, the story of a troubled young writer, Antoine Roquentin. It is also one of the most profound explorations of modern existentialism. Roquentin confronts a terrifying realisation that he is radically free in a world devoid of predetermined meaning. Freedom, Sartre reminds us, is not liberation from responsibility. It is a responsibility. So, human beings must choose and then bear the consequences of their choices.

On May 26, the Supreme Court in Bar Council of India v. Union of India stayed the operation of paragraph 249 of the Delhi High Court’s judgment in Court on its Own Motion in Re: Suicide Committed by Sushant Rohilla (2025), which had held that no law student could be prevented from appearing in examinations or progressing academically solely on account of attendance shortages. The Delhi High Court judgment was a reaction to the incredibly tragic suicide of a student allegedly subjected to institutional pressures arising from attendance-related disciplinary action.

The case will be decided on the merits in the coming months. However, the stay is significant because it stops a dangerous assumption that had quietly entered legal education: That attendance, as a norm, is merely an administrative requirement. This is not an argument for thoughtless disciplinary compliance, nor is it an attempt to diminish the tragedy that gave rise to the Delhi High Court intervention. Attendance requirements should never become instruments of harassment. No policy should be devoid of emotions. They should never be applied mechanically or without context.

This stay order invites us to revisit Sartre’s existential question in the context of legal education, and many larger questions remain unanswered. What kind of legal education are we imagining when a high court judgment enables one to earn a law degree without entering the class? That question should trouble us all. The classroom is not a site where students passively receive legal rules. It is where they learn how to think, listen, question authority, and challenge institutions. Classrooms are designed to be shelters for academic freedom. It is where future lawyers encounter the uncomfortable realities. A law school classroom, at its best, is a space of productive discomfort.

In an age increasingly dominated by artificial intelligence, the role of a teacher in a classroom becomes even more important. As a law teacher, I have spent countless hours reading assignments and examinations that increasingly bear the unmistakable fingerprints of generative AI. Intellectually hollow paragraphs arrive polished, coherent, and technically correct. I miss grammatical errors and amateur ideas. Cognitive labour and reflection are slowly being outsourced to machines.

And yet I continue to read and invest time in grading machine-generated texts. Not because every student is ethical, but because teaching is founded on a relationship of trust and accountability. The classroom remains one of the few places where ideas can still be interrogated collectively rather than generated algorithmically. The Delhi High Court judgment, however well-intentioned, risks weakening that relationship.

It is worth asking whether this is the message we wish to send at a moment when legal education is at the brink of an existential crisis. India has approximately 1,721 law schools, with private law colleges outnumbering government institutions by more than two to one. This remarkable expansion has undoubtedly democratised access to legal education, but at what cost? How many comply with the Bar Council of India (BCI) norms beyond paper formalities? How many of these institutions have adequate full-time faculty? How many institutions have the necessary infrastructure for clinical programmes, legal aid, or interdisciplinary engagement? How many of these institutions merely set up non-existent rooms and fabricate documents before the annual BCI’s visits? In any case, a solution to mediocre educational experiences cannot be the abandonment of classroom participation itself.

The Supreme Court’s stay should, therefore, be welcomed. It is not a victory for compulsory attendance, but it is an opportunity to reopen a conversation that legal education urgently needs. The debate should not be confined to attendance. The real debate concerns what law school classrooms are for. Are law schools merely degree-granting panopticons, or are they communities of inquiry? Is it time to rethink the BCI’s legal education rules? Can a student absent from the classroom remain present in the struggle against institutional violence?

These questions remain conspicuously absent from the debate. Instead, we continue to produce more law schools and more degrees. The attendance debate risks becoming a convenient red herring for the deeper structural problems plaguing legal education. If a significant number of institutions are unable to persuade students that attending classes is worthwhile, perhaps the problem is not attendance alone. Perhaps it is pedagogy, it is curriculum, or it is institutional culture.

Perhaps the most unsettling question emerging from this controversy is not whether we can compel students to attend classes. It is whether we have reached a point where we require judicial affirmation to convince students that classrooms matter. Should students possess the freedom to stay away from classrooms? I do not know, or maybe yes. But human freedom, as Sartre reminds us, is inextricably linked to radical responsibility.

The writer is an Assistant Professor of Law and Associate Dean at Jindal Global Law School