Teaching law more practically

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: Holding the rank of a premier institute in the country is no small task and for the National Law School of India University (NLSIU), it means constantly improving the quality of education for lawyers and leading the way for contemporary schools.

According to NLSIU vice-chancellor A Jayagovind, the university did this by boosting efforts to induce practical education in the 60 courses that it offered. “One of the complaints about Indian education is that there is a lack of practical side to our classroom education. We have been constantly working towards bridging this gap.”

Annually, 80 students graduate from the campus in Nagarbhavi in Bangalore’s outskirts, all of them having undergone mandatory internships with trial lawyers, and high court or Supreme Court lawyers. “Some brighter students also intern assisting Supreme Court judges and doing research for them on particular cases,” the professor said.

In line with global standards, moot courts that were earlier restricted only to trials, were now being replicated in other problem resolution methods like arbitrations, negotiation and counselling. “With globalisation, law has become uniform everywhere—especially in company law and intellectual property rights law, standardisation will become key. It is only right that education matched the developments in international space.”

For the institute that has over 1,000 well-placed alumni across the globe, inability to expand its faculty strength has deterred growth plans. NLSIU currently employs 25 professors. “We have ideas to expand, but we have no resources. Given the opportunities available in the market, and new areas like legal process outsourcing emerging, academics is no attractive career for lawyers,” Jayagovind said.

Lack of faculty strength has also constrained the cooperative teaching method, where two teachers of related disciplines simultaneously lecture the same class to offer different perspectives on a topic. “We did not take up the cooperative teaching method significantly as we do not have enough teachers to support it regularly,” he said.

NLSIU would launch a University Grants Commission-funded Centre for ‘Study of Law and Social Exclusion’ in its campus by February 2008. The centre would focus on research and study the problems faced by the weaker sections from a legal point of view. “We believe that outside such issues are highly politicised. More research could offer new insights,” Jayagovind said.