Course Description

This is the second part of the mandatory Civil Procedure Course prescribed by the Bar Council of India. The two courses along with the clinical course on Drafting, Pleading and Conveyancing, will help you understand how one can effectively secure the substantive rights that you studied in private law courses such as torts, contracts, property, and family law. Like CPC I, it will do this by tracing the lifecycle of a civil case and explicating the procedures one must follow at each stage in order to obtain legal relief.

We begin the course with a short recap of the material covered in CPC-I. We then move through the later stages of the civil trial including interim relief, judgment, appeals and revisions, executions and the special rules that govern particular kinds of suits. By the end of the course, you will have traced a dispute through every major stage of the civil case cycle.

This course will not attempt to cover every provision and rule in the Code. We will not view the code as a checklist that one has to complete. Instead, we will treat procedure as a framework that allows strategic choice and legal creativity. We will study not only what the law permits and prohibits, but also discuss how lawyers can use the discretion inherent in the code to navigate a civil trial. We also engage with theoretical and comparative scholarship to understand the policy choices embedded in these rules and discuss how they might be improved.

Procedure is often treated as the unglamorous sibling of substantive law. The instructors of this course disagree. The rules of civil procedure determine whether a right can be enforced, when can they be enforced, the cost of enforcement, and against whom they can be enforced. A lawyer who does not understand how to vacate a temporary injunction, where to file an urgent appeal, or how to give effect to a consent decree is one who cannot serve their client. Procedures are, in this sense, not “boring technicalities” but the site where rights become real. We hope, by the end of the course, you feel the same way.