Teaching law more practically

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Sunday , February 03, 2008 at 2323 hrs 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.

The centre has recruited about eight candidates for the project that UGC would back for five years. NLSIU offers residential courses and admissions are based on merit. Each student spent a total of close to Rs 90,000 in lodging and tuition fees. However, need-based concessions were extended to deserving students.

NLSIU students won 11 Rhodes scholarships for study at Oxford over the last seven years. Scholarships from several other American and British universities are also awarded to students annually.

The university began operations in 1987, lead by founder-director NR Madhava Menon. The first batch of students joined on July 1, 1988.

NLSIU was formed to act as a pacesetter and a testing ground for experiments in legal education. The Bar Council of India, which had the statutory responsibility to maintain standards in professional legal education, initially mooted the idea to set up such an institution.

A deemed university status to the law school came eventually, and with the support of the Karnataka government and the Bangalore University, the college came into being. On August 29, 1987, the state government issued a Gazette Notification to establish the University as it is known today.