Abstract
The face of post‐independent Indian legal education has altered dramatically since the inception (and consequent replication) of the five‐year national law school model. Whereas traditional Indian universities offered (and in some cases continue to offer) law as a three‐year full or part‐time graduate programme, the new national law schools have sought to foster, through an intensive five‐year model, a combined degree in law and the arts with a strong commitment to improve existing legal infrastructure. Indeed, with this ambition, these schools have spearheaded critical changes in syllabi and structure to challenge a new generation of lawyers to think critically, analyse comprehensively, and argue articulately.
But more than twenty years after the Bar Council of India started the first law school dedicated to the multidisciplinary, socially influential teaching of law, now is the time perhaps for retrospection and analysis. What was the initial impetus that fostered the need for these law schools? And more importantly, have the schools met the ambitions that encouraged their consciously rushed growth?
By (a) tracing the events that led to the inception of these schools, (b) locating their historical impetus and functional direction, (c) understanding the differentiated role of the national law school and (d) reviewing its limitations within the larger Indian higher education landscape, this article seeks to answer these larger questions as well as analyse critically the steps that are needed to regain sustainable momentum in the movement towards a socially culpable and intellectually relevant legal education – is it time for another inquiry?
Notes
1 The INC was formed in 1885 following the first war of Indian Independence with an overrepresented population of lawyers and a barrister, WC Bonnerjee, as its president. See Gandhi, JS, Sociology of Legal Profession, Law and Legal System: the Indian Setting, Gian, Delhi, 1987, 3.
2 Gangadhar Tilak, Lala Lajpat Rai, Motilal Nehru, Sardar Patel and Jawaharlal Nehru were all lawyers who returned to India in these colonial years, armed with foreign legal education to contribute significantly to the nation's freedom movement. Ibid.
3 A notable exception was Rajendra Prasad. He was educated at Calcutta University and went on to be the first President of newly independent India.
4 Rao, B Shiva, ‘The Framing of India's Constitution’, Vol I–V, The AIPP, Delhi, 1968.
5 Galanter, Marc, ‘The Study of Indian Legal Profession’ (1968) 111(2) Law and Society Review 201–17.
6 Galanter (ibid) notes that lawyers formed an average of 30.8% of the Lok Sabha between 1968 and 1969. This number escalated in the 1980s under Indira Gandhi's rule when about 63% of the cabinet were law graduates.
7 Ibid. However, there is no mention of whether these lawyers were practising: only that they were law graduates.
8 Universities followed soon afterwards in Punjab, Allahabad, Benaras, Patna, Delhi, Nagpur, Andhra, Agra and Annamalai: see ibid.
9 Karwe, RP, ‘History of the Government Law College, Bombay’ (1939) 9 Bombay Law College Magazine 1.
10 Karwe (ibid) asserts that the Government Law College in Bombay was the first law institution established in India. But in another text, Aggarwal suggests that there is evidence that the Madras Law College was established in 1840: see Aggarwal, AP, ‘Legal Education in India’ (1959–60) 12 J Legal Education 231 at 240, fn7.
11 Now known as the Government Law College, Bombay.
12 Aggarwal (above, n 10) comments mainly on the early presidency schools.
13 Karwe (above, n 9) at 9.
14 A large majority of these lawyers were practising litigators and the general presumption seems to have been that they were best considered to impart legal education (Aggarwal at p 233, quoting from the Bombay Law College Magazine: ‘the object of the law school is to enable students to practise law – to become lawyers able to apply the principles to concrete cases, Such direction can only be given by professors who are in practice and who know how legal principles are handled and applied in the courts to actual facts’.
15 Aggarwal attributes this to the lack of finances to develop good libraries and other necessary facilities – deeming their impact on legal education slightly insignificant. He also notes (p 3) that the Indian University Commission in 1902 was not positively inclined to the calibre of education imparted in these liberal arts schools and many of the law classes were closed in the early years of the twentieth century. For more detail on the state of liberal arts colleges which ran law classes, see the 14th Law Commission of India Report, 1958 at 527, available at http://lawcommissionofindia.nic.in/1-50/Report14vol1.pdf.
16 Indian University Commission Report 1902, Aggarwal (above) at 3.
17 Ibid.
18 In Lahore and Allahabad: both, incidentally, went on to have well regarded high courts. See ibid.
19 Ibid at 4.
20 Mehren, a professor at Harvard Law School was a Ford Foundation researcher and spent much time comparing and contrasting the systems of India: von Mehren, A, ‘Law and Legal Education in India: Some Observations’ (1964–65) 78 Harvard Law Review 1181.
21 Ibid.
22 Quoting from a report from the turn of the century, the Radhakrishnan Committee: ‘A detailed inquiry was made to the reason why students sought admission into colleges of law and it was discovered that a very large proportion of them (perhaps 50%) had joined not by deliberate preference for the legal profession but because they could find no occupation after taking a degree’: Progress of Education in India, 1922–27 (1929) at 1187.
23 Mehren (above, n 20) notes that in the 1960s, outside of successful commercial practices in the large urban centres and the more significant appellate practice, the career of law was not ‘particularly rewarding financially’ (at 1184).
24 The 14th Law Commission of India Report (above, n 15) at 520 notes that with the passing of governance from the British crown, there was a need for an ‘increasing number of men of law to fill the roles of legal practitioners, judges and administrators’.
25 The Bombay University Reforms Committee in 1925 noted that the courses in the University had ‘too much in view of practice and the case law and too little in the science and principles of law’. Ibid.
26 Ibid at 521.
27 Ibid at 525.
28 Ibid at 526.
29 Quoted in Markose, AT, ‘The Object of Legal Education’, All India Seminar on Legal Education, University of Poona, 1972.
30 Ibid at 1 (emphasis added).
31 Ibid.
32 Banares Hindu University Inquiry Committee (Chairman: PB Gajendragadkar), Report on Legal Education, Ministry of Education and Youth Services, New Delhi, 1969.
33 Ibid quoted by Aggarwal (above, n 10) at 13.
34 Aggarwal (above, n 10) at 13.
35 Ibid. While there were multiple comments on the nature of the desired change in pedagogy, there was persuasion for ‘training in preparing of written briefs in difficult cases’ and moot courts based on social problems that plagued the country.
36 The identity of democracy seems to be the most pertinent of these ideals: Agrawala, SK (ed), Legal Education in India: Problems and Perspectives, Bombay, Tripathi, 1973, at 11–22.
37 In 1979 the UGC recorded that in addition to this technique of fostering dialogue in the classroom, there was a need to revamp in parallel the state of examinations and evaluation of students and include better teaching resources, faculty exchanges and regional comparative workshops. See Towards a Socially Relevant Legal Education: A Consolidated Report of the University Grants Commission's Workshop on Modernization of Legal Education, University Grants Commission, Delhi, May 1979.
38 Many of the recommendations for a reformed legal education system required that it be more relevant to society in general.
39 Between 1975 and 1977 the University Grants Commission revisited the subject and organised several workshops on modernising legal education. The Commission reported on pedagogy, curriculum reform and other aids of change. See UGC Report (above, n 37).
40 In 1979, the UGC Report (ibid) recorded Baxi's views on the integration of the National Service Scheme (NSS) and law studies and whether there were ways of incorporating it into a university education curriculum (especially in the context of legal literacy clinical programmes which could be seen as offering a social function) (p 29).
41 The Radhakrishnan report noted: ‘A detailed inquiry was made as to the reason why students sought admission into colleges of law and it was discovered that undoubtedly a very large percentage of them (perhaps 50%) had joined not by deliberate preference for the legal profession but because they could find no occupation after taking a degree’: Progress of Education in India 1922–27 (1929) at 1187 quoted in Aggarwal (above, n 10) at 6.
42 By way of illustration, even the inclusion of practice‐oriented subjects like taxation and labour law in the Delhi Law School in 1955 was seen as ‘innovative’: see Faculty of Law, University of Delhi, Bulletin of Information 5 (1955). Also see the UGC Report (Chapter V) where the Commission recorded that there were 26 optional subjects offered to the students (UGC Report, above, n 37, at 5.8). Yet, while courses of this nature could be offered, they needed to be relevant and capable of being ‘adjusted to available resources’ that the University had (at para 5.11).
43 The argument in favour of graduation was that these students were more mature and better equipped to deliver the serious commitment that the legal education system required: see the 14th Law Commission of India Report (above, n 15) at 527–30.
44 In 1935, Indian law schools, under the recommendation of the Bombay Legal Education Committee (and, perhaps, in note of the school's perceived levels of education) were open to students who had completed just their intermediate education. The intermediate system was a 10+2 system that required two years of college after ten years of schooling and admitted students who were non‐graduates and between 16 and 18 years of age (ibid).
45 14th Law Commission of India Report (above, n 15) at 529.
46 The Bombay Law College, for example, allowed non‐graduates who had taken pre‐law intermediate courses to join law school without graduation, suggesting that there were students in early law schools who had no concentrated study in the social sciences with which to relate their legal education (ibid at 527).
47 For a detailed view on the early ambition to expand the law school curriculum see Ambedkar, B, ‘Thoughts on the Reform of Legal Education in the Bombay Presidency’ (1936) 7 Law College Magazine 6 (Government Law College, Bombay).
48 The Bar Council of India pre‐determines, for all practical purposes, the core content of the three‐year LLB course. In order that a degree holder may qualify to practise law, the Council requires that all ten of its mandatory courses and at least six of its optional courses be taught. Four of these six courses must come from an optional list provided and the Universities have an option to pick two courses from outside the list.
49 See von Mehren, A, Aspects of Legal Scholarship and Education in India: A Report, New Delhi, 1963, 1187. See also Mehren (n 20).
50 This was more in reference to his discontent with the teaching styles and Mehren noted (ibid) that students were not encouraged to explore the subjects that they were taught and instead, were poorly prepared and forced to pay attention whilst their teacher expounded on conventional legal theory.
51 Quoting from Justice Chandra Reddy of the Andhra Pradesh High Court: Reddy, J, ‘Lawyers Role in Society’ (1956) 50 Bom LRJ 17.
52 Annual exams were held for the first and second years of law and failure in any one of the exams was seen as failure of the year: see Aggarwal (above, n 10) 11–12.
53 As an indication of such indifference, the LCR noted that a majority of the students did not purchase the prescribed text‐books and instead bought cheap university examination papers and their answers: see p 539 of the 14th Law Commission of India Report (above, n 15).
54 The 14th Law Commission of India Report (above, n 15) noted (at p 544) that the examinations were ‘conducted on more or less stereotyped lines or mechanical basis’.
55 Aggarwal (above, n 10) at 10–11.
56 Ibid.
57 Ibid. The Law Commission noted that ‘of the students who had all passed with first class distinction in a particular year, only one deserved to have passed with that distinction’: thus leaving much to be inferred about the prevailing evaluation processes.
58 At p 544 of its Report, the Law Commission noted that it did not need to be emphasised further that the examinations conducted in this manner would result in the ‘complete destruction of the whole of the fabric of legal education’.
59 Aggarwal (above, n 10) at 37.
60 This disinterest in the profession obviously had much to do with the fact that the practice of law in the post‐independence era was seen as neither socially nor economically convenient.
61 14th Law Commission of India Report (above, n 15) at 528.
62 Aggarwal (above, n 10) at 530.
63 See Anandjee, ‘Objectives of Legal Education’ in Agrawala (no 36) at 37–48.
64 Ibid.
65 The 1979 UGC Report (above, n 37) notes at 1ine 7, ‘Instead of an LL.B degree providing a student with sound grasp of law for further LL.M studies, it is generally the case that the LL.M degree redeems a poor LL.B degree … the LL.M Course has really become an extended LL.B course’ (emphasis added).
66 The Grants Commission took a particularly negative view of this programme, commenting that the state of postgraduate studies in law in India was ‘truly alarming’.
67 See 1979 UGC Report (above, n 37) at 2 (1ine 6).
68 The Bar Council's domain ended at the LLB level and each university was free to develop the curriculum and pedagogy at the LLM level: see ibid at 5.4.
69 While some universities required students to write a dissertation, the Commission noted (ibid at 5.12) that most of them were ‘verbose, highly derivative and on recklessly chosen subjects which did not fulfil any of its objectives’, thus suggesting that the exercise was without any real purpose.
70 See ibid, Chapter V. The Report was a consolidation of the consensus and recommendations arrived at the UCG Regional Workshops in Madras, Punjab, Poona and Patna during 1975–76.
71 In an attempt to lure only committed students, there was a move to make the degree only open to full‐time students and to make the admission standards more strict: see ibid at 5.7, 5.14 and 5.15.
72 The spirit of this self‐learning enquiry was welcomed by the Commission: see ibid at 5.15.
73 The recommendation was to have an external and internal evaluation of student papers (ibid at 5.13). This attention to legal writing and research is encouraging.
74 These seminars seem to be a way of encouraging teaching potential of these students and ensuring competence. In addition to the seminars on legal education, the recommendation was to have these students initiate faculty discussions and possibly even have enough exposure as to take some classes for the LLB students (under supervision): see ibid at 5.14.
75 Ibid at 5.9. Yet at the same time the Commission commented that while there was a need to critically review the LLM curricula, there was no reason why it could not be adjusted to available resources.
76 Mehren (above, n 20) comments that the common law was a functional evolution tied to the value structure and social conditions of the West: hardly befitting of the Indian system without modification.
77 Mehren (above, n 20) at 1183.
78 In terms of promoting legal education, in 1954 the Foundation donated US$12 million to promote what it called ‘the programme on international studies’: see Krishnan, J, ‘Professor Kingsfield goes to Delhi: American Academics, the Ford Foundation, and the Development of Legal Education in India’, 46 Am. J. Legal History 447.
79 For a detailed history of this activity see ibid at 459–68.
80 Karwe (above, n 9) at 69. The first recorded shift in this attitude of easy acceptance to law colleges was with the first India University Commission report in 1902 that suggested that a bachelor's degree in the arts and sciences be made an admission requirement. See Aggarwal (above, n 10) at 4.
81 Bombay University Legal Education Commission Recommendation 1935, quoted in the 14th Law Commission of India Report (above, n 15) at 530.
82 Graduation was not seen as a requirement to enrol into a law programme.
83 As an illustration of this attitude, Dr BR Ambedkar, the Principal of the Government Law College in Bombay (and the core member of the Constituent Assembly that drafted the Indian Constitution) commented: ‘what a boy studies during his four years in an Arts College for obtaining the B.A. degree … has been found as of no material benefit to him in the study of law. Ambedkar, B, ‘Thoughts on the Reform of Legal Education in the Bombay Presidency’ (1936) 7 Law College Magazine 6.
84 The Rajasthan Legal Education Committee which made its report in 1955 took the view that only graduates should be admitted to the LLB course which, it proposed, should be a three year course and in the same year, the Andhra University under the appointment of President Mr Justice Wadia recommended the same admission requirement (see pp 39, 42 and 44 of Report).
85 On the Bombay position on ‘pre‐law’ courses, see the 14th Law Commission of India Report (above, n 15) at 533. In contrast, see the position of the Radhakrishnan Committee in Chitale, ‘Standardization of Legal Education’ (1951) 58 Bom LRJ 57.
86 Based on these recommendations, in 1958 the Law Commission report recommended a university degree admission requirement.
87 For the report on three‐year legal education with state‐bar induced training periods see Report of the Sanddler Commission of 1917 (1919), the Calcutta University Commission Report (1907) and the Radhakrishnan Commission on University Education Report (1950) all quoted in Aggarwal (above, n 10) at 7.
88 The Indian University Commission of 1902 recommended the two‐year legal education programme and after 1908–09 most Indian universities were two‐year bachelors programmes with certain select exceptions (Andhra University and Bombay University programmes both were three year programmes for those who had passed the intermediate examinations). The High Court of Punjab, as a condition precedent for the admission to the legal profession, similarly, required three years of law school education rather than the customary two. See Aggarwal (above, n 10) at 6.
89 Krishnan (above, n 78) at 478 notes that Menon returned to Delhi from travelling and taking notes from legal academia in the West in 1978 and almost immediately was asked by the Bar Council of India to help in restructuring legal education throughout the country.
90 The Gajedragadkar Committee and the Law Commission had both advocated for the requirement of a baccalaureate degree as a pre‐requisite.
91 See Krishnan (above, n 78) at 479.
92 See Galanter, Marc, Goonesekere, Savitri and Twining, William, Report of the Expert Panel on the National Law School of India University (1987–96), Bangalore, India, 1996 (hereinafter the Expert Report).
93 Ibid at 3.
94 NLSIU Act of 1986 as cited in Expert Report (above, n 92).
95 When Menon first mooted this idea, his colleague, Dean Tripathi, wrote an editorial in the Times of India deriding Menon's plans as ‘unrealistic, simplistic and unnecessarily radical’. See Krishnan (above, n 78) at 480.
96 Until very recently, each of the national law schools had their own entrance exams determining admission. In March 2008, seven national law schools – NLSIU (Bangalore), NALSAR (Hyderabad), NLIU, NUJS (Calcutta), NLU (Jodhpur), HNLU (Raipur) and GNLU (Gandhinagar) – agreed to accept admissions through a common law entrance test – the CLAT (Common Law Admissions Test)
97 Only one of the fifteen alumni that were interviewed for this article mentioned that she had always wanted to be a lawyer. Yet there was almost a universal consensus amongst interviewees that the national law schools had positively changed their perception of legal education and their aspirations for it. Author interviews on file, February 2009.
98 Says a recent Rhodes scholar from NALSAR 2007 about his choice to go to law school: ‘It may well have been a default choice based on a process of elimination – I knew I didn't want to be an engineer or doctor and doing a B.A. in any of the humanities proper was considered acceptable in the academic environment that I was exposed to (although not at home). I knew nothing whatsoever about the legal profession, so it was not entirely a rational decision’: Author interviews on file, February 2008.
99 A NALSAR 2004 graduate who joined an elite law firm on graduation, attended a US Top Ten Law School on a scholarship and now practises law in New Jersey. Author interview on file, February 2008.
101 Emphasis original. Interestingly, this alumni joined a top law firm on graduation where almost every (if not all) first year associates who joined that year were from one of the national law schools.
100 As a limited illustration of this peer group dynamic, of the twelve students from India who were admitted to Harvard Law School's LLM programme in 2008 (the largest South Asian graduate student cohort at the school), only one (who had attended an undergraduate institution in India) was not a graduate of the national law school. Author data on file, February 2009.
103 NALSAR 2006. Author interview on file, February 2008.
102 Most national law schools have high (if not complete) post‐graduation recruitment rates.
104 This 2007 graduate worked for the project finance team of India's largest corporate law firm but has since worked on energy and development in Africa and was scheduled to start an Erasmus year in 2009, studying Law and Economics. Author interview on file, February 2008.
106 Emphasis added. This interviewee went on to graduate with a Rhodes scholarship with, potentially, all the limitless opportunity that he had hoped for on admittance. Author interview on file, February 2008.
105 In the course of my interviews, I spoke with alumni from these law schools who, on graduation, spent time being ‘non‐lawyers’. One alumni from NLSIU (2005) had spent a year taking a photography course in the South Indian hill station of Ooty and an alumni from NALSAR (2004) had spent the last three years in the Delhi theatre circuit. Yet both these graduates were applying and had been accepted into prestigious law school programmes abroad (Cambridge and Columbia, respectively) and were considering moving back into law. This suggests a clear change in attitude of students graduating from these law schools. Seen as bright intellectuals with the safety net of their national law school education, they could perceivably do anything.
107 The premium these students placed on their own acceptance into these national law schools was interesting. The prestige of these law schools had not only made the institutions attractive – they had made the people who attended them attractive by association. And this acceptance validated these students' own sense of ‘elite’ self. This is a particularly popular theme illustrated well by this one student's (NALSAR 2006) answer to whether he would have considered attending a non‐national law school – ‘No. I doubt that [I would have enrolled in a traditional law school]. I would probably not have attended a five year non‐national law school for that matter. In fact, I would have thought twice about attending a semi‐elite law school. I may not enjoy admitting it, given my reservations about their content, but I put a lot of premium on the entrance exams to the law schools. Even if you may be sceptical about the way they are conducted, you tend to believe that your performance in an entrance exam is a reflection of your future capabilities as a lawyer’. Emphasis original. Author interview on file, February 2008.
108 A student from NALSAR's first batch (who went on to join the ranks of an international law firm and graduate from Oxford) commented on her reason for joining a law school – ‘I joined [law school] mostly because I wanted to do a professional degree and law was the most convenient option at the time. But more importantly, I had heard about the reputation of NLSIU Bangalore and it seemed like an exciting and challenging place to be in.’ Emphasis original. Author interview, February 2008.
109 Emphasis added. Author interview on file, March 2008.
110 See the Expert Report (above, n 92) at 8.
111 I interviewed about 80 students from four of the five top national law schools during the spring of 2008. Interview transcripts on file with author.
112 This discord was particularly prominent and almost all of the first and second year students complained that, subject to limited exceptions, the teaching was ‘disappointing’. In a more descriptive interview, a 2007 graduate shared the general disappointing perception of the academic experience – ‘Courses were tedious, there was nothing to be gained by attending class, other than the marks for attendance … Exams tested only knowledge, so basically came down to a memory test. Projects and presentations/viva were a breeze since plagiarism was never detected and, for the most part one could confidently talk total rubbish since the professor was about as lost and disinterested as the student.’
113 The NALSAR test used to have a written component to the essay but the new common entrance exam (CLAT) is a computer‐operated multiple‐choice test. There is a notional ‘interview’ process but nowhere near as important as the exam rankings and no students are denied admission at the interview stage.
114 Additional pre‐law coaching classes to help students successfully gain law school admission have, in the recent past, become very popular. In illustration, with the exception of four students, every student in the NALSAR batches who were interviewed had attended a coaching class of some sort.
115 There seem to be a range of test preparation services ranging, depending on nature and duration, from INR 5000 to INR 15000. While these are affordable for most of the demographic that takes these tests, they remain non‐accessible for much of the country. Similarly, the new LSAT exam that has been imported from LSAC, USA to fit to the Indian law school testing for admission to the new Jindal Global Law School – a new, ‘global’ law school scheduled to accept its first batch in 2009 – has an exam fee of INR 3500.
116 For example, NALSAR, a school in Hyderabad which was modelled after the NLSIU model in 1999, replaced the latter's reigning first place in the country's law school rankings in 2008. See India Today cover story, ‘India's Best Colleges’, 22 May 2008, available at http://indiatoday.intoday.in/site/Story/8688/Cover%20Story/India's+best+colleges.html
117 Many traditional law schools have introduced five‐year undergraduate programmes for students since the success of this model.
118 It would be unfair to say there was no interest on the part of students to return and make teaching commitments to Indian law schools. Many have and many continue to be involved with these law schools, at the risk of having to deal with political and monetary disincentives. The majority of the law school system is still largely old‐school and from both shared and personal experience, there is reason to believe that the environment is not conducive to effective tenure career paths and those who go back, go to satiate deep felt desires to contribute to the larger goal of Indian legal education in spite of the existing faculty system.
119 The undergraduate degree could particularly be useful to women more likely to invest into a professional education at 18 rather than at 24 (which is the median age for admitted law students in countries like the US).
120 In 2009, a private law school near Delhi, the Jindal Global Law School, with strong ties to many of the elite schools in the West (including Oxford, UCL, Harvard and Yale) has started operations with both three‐year graduate and five‐year undergraduate degrees: see http://www.jgls.org.
121 Following years of caste‐based tensions to which the administration turned a blind eye, the Ambedkar Law College in Chennai (Madras), India – one of the country's prominent traditional law schools (which, like other schools, has since introduced a five‐year programme) – was host to an oppressive attack in November 2008. See a public report of the incident and blame that was attributed to the administration of the law school at http://atrocitynews.wordpress.com/2008/11/24/caste-violence-in-drambedkar-law-college-chennai-%E2%80%93-a-report/ (last accessed May 2009).
122 The Hidayatullah National University of Law in Chhattisgarh was set up under the National Law School model in 2003. Students went on strike at the school because the infrastructure provided did not meet the expectations they had of a ‘national law school’. The campaign has attracted a lot of attention but, importantly, brings to focus many of the failings of the school (see the ‘Why Strike’ section in http://www.revivehnlu.com/why_strike.html) that, in this instance, brought on the strike but, on a larger scale, could well threaten the very sustainability of the model (poor academic and other resources, lack of infrastructure, etc). Also, while this remains an extreme example, the nature of the campaign is a healthy indication of the lack of patience that students have for schools that do not deliver the ideals they expect.
123 Library development and research development is integral to this process. See the Expert Report (above, n 92) at 19.
124 Foreign law firms are not allowed to practise law in India, but there is strong speculation that this will not remain the case for too long.
125 Yale Law School, for example, launched a fellowship in 2007 for alumni that were interested in teaching law in India/Pakistan. From interactions with both the Fellows that have accepted this position as well as the students they have taught, the programme seems to have enriched the system. Of course, key to the success is the fact that these Fellows are instructors who are not dependent on domestic law school systems for resources and recognition.
126 Firms and corporations in the US and the UK not only invest monetarily in school and faculty infrastructure (student research centres, professorial ‘chairs’, scholarships, etc) but also allow for associates, so inclined, to spend time teaching in law schools in the area.
127 Notable amongst these players, of course, are corporation's houses, successful litigators and, more recently, legal process outsourcing firms.
128 The Jindal Global Law School in Haryana, for example, distinguishes itself from its peers by attracting young, globally educated faculty with internationally comparable pay‐scales.
129 As this paper was being sent for publication, the Ministry of Law and Justice (in collaboration with the National Law University Delhi and the Bar Council of India) was preparing for the ‘National Consultation of Second Generation Reforms in Legal Education’, aimed at reassessing, among other issues, continuing legal education and evaluation. See http://supremecourtofindia.nic.in/speeches/speeches_2010/Legal_Education_reforms_1-5-2010.pdf (text of the special address delivered by the Chief Justice of India).
130 Quoting from the Report of the Bombay Legal Education Committee Report, 1949 (p 5) and the Report of the University Education Commission, vol I (p 258).