Considered the ‘baby’ of the Bar Council of India (BCI), the National Law School of India University (NLSIU), holds the beacon to continuing excellence in legal studies. Now, in its 27th year, NLSIU was conceptualised during the second half of the 1980s. Since its inception in 1988, it has spearheaded a new momentum in legal studies in a scenario marked by poor delivery systems and questionable quality of legal education in India. The birth of NLSIU is regarded as one of the greatest achievements of the BCI.
A concerted effort by the Judiciary, the BCI, the Karnataka Bar Council, the Bangalore University and the Government of Karnataka set the ball rolling to reform legal education in India. NLSIU, an outcome of a notification under the National Law School of India University Act (Karnataka Act 22 of 1986) became the platform for a centre of excellence for legal education and research in the country. With a US $ 150,000 government grant, the school was modelled around the case study format of the Harvard Law School. Stretching across 23 acres of green, NLSIU, which started as a two-room tenement within the Central College campus at Jnana Bharathi (Bangalore University), now has its own college cum residential campus for both students and faculty. The institute that started with nine dedicated teachers is seen as the vision of the legendary Prof. N. R. Madhava Menon, the father of modern legal education in India. He served as its founder director for 10 years.
Carrying forward this baton of excellence is its current Vice Chancellor - Prof. (Dr.) R.Venkata Rao, an optimistic, highly passionate and young at heart legal educationist. The institute’s diverse and inclusive campus life stands testimony to the number of national and international awards bagged by its students.
Currently serving his second term at NLSIU since 2009, Dr. Rao shares his experiences in a career spanning 37 years -- and raring to go -- with his second innings at the institute slated to continue till 2019. Prior to joining NLSIU, Prof. Rao, endowed with an M.A. (Lit), M.L (Law) and PhD, served the Faculty of Law, Andhra University for 31 years in various capacities as the Dean (Faculty of Law), Principal (University College Of Law), Chairman (Board Of Studies in Law) and Head of the Department of Law. He also held office as the Dean of Students’ Affairs (Andhra University) and was a member of the Executive Council of Andhra University (2005 to 2007). He spoke to Corporate Citizen on the legal system that needs to flex and flux according to the changing times, the relevance of the Common Law Aptitude Test (CLAT), on the topicality of programs offered at NLSIU and on the need for continuous experimentation at law campuses for devising a legal curriculum that is practical and ensures good governance. By Sangeeta Ghosh Dastidar
Dr. Rao: The birth of the institute itself is unique which came under the mandate of the Bar Council of India (BCI) that governs and maintains standards in legal education in India. In the 1980s a thought arose that there was need for excellence in legal education. The BCI started conceptualising, and academicians, judges, members of the BCI came together and deliberated for over two-and-a-half years. If it took two years and nine months to frame the Indian Constitution, the NLSIU also took almost the same time to emerge! But people said, “Are you crazy? How can you have excellence in legal education? ” Excellence in legal education was unheard of, although people accepted the same for the AIIMS and JIPMER (medical) , the IITs, RECs (regional engineering colleges) and IIMs – Ahmedabad, Mumbai and Kolkata. It was jokingly said that “India has the dubious distinction of producing lawyers.” Arguably, it is a fact that the eminence of a Nani Palkhivala, M.C. Setalvad or M. Hidayatullah was produced not because of law colleges but in spite of them. Old timers said, “Law colleges provide spaces for vehicles which cannot park elsewhere,” or “If you have nothing else to do, you join law or, pursuing legal education is a national hobby.” But a core group of people – Judges of the Supreme Court including eminent personalities like Ram Jethmalani from the BCI, VR Reddy, Justice N Mathur (who later became the Judge in Rajasthan), played a pivotal role in shaping the concept of NLSIU. The trio had courage, conviction, commitment, dedication, devotion and determination and relentlessly pursued the idea of excellence in legal education and establishing a national law school in India.
Similar to how the US Supreme Court has nine judges, our institute started with nine dedicated teachers led by the legendary professor and Padma Shri awardee, N. R. Madhava Menon, who became the Founder Director of the institute. They made a lot of sacrifices; sometimes they were even prepared to forgo their salary arrears to purchase books for the library and had lunch under the greenwood trees. But their commitment made NLSIU grow from strength to strength. Despite this, critics continued to doubt if this ‘experiment’ would last forever, or if this bubble would burst. Do understand that from 1988 onwards, when NLSIU was set up, and for the next ten years following its inception, this was the only national law school in India.
NLSIU, even today continues to be an experiment because you keep on changing. Society keeps on evolving and keeping pace with the changes is just one of the secrets of our success. Excellence in legal education was unheard of in the 1980s and therefore it was said, “We will start an experiment and prove it to the world”. People were watching it first with doubt, then with suspicion, but then it was followed with a sense of awe and admiration –from 1988 to 1998 this was the only law school which became a success. The success of the institute continues to up the benchmarks for other law colleges which has led to a paradigm shift in recent years, especially among students who now view law as a career prospect even at the undergraduate level. The phase during 1988 to 1998 was a decade of fantastic achievement for any dedicated national law school in India.
NLSIU offering a five-year BA LLB (honours) program after grade XII akin to the IITs is an offshoot of our successful experimentation. Once this program became a success, the second prestigious national law school, NALSAR University of Law at Hyderabad was set up in 1998. Then, the period 1999 to 2000 saw two more law schools emerge -- NUJS (National University of Juridical Sciences) in Kolkata and the National Judicial Academy (NJA) in Bhopal. Both NUJS and NJA were set up under the expert guidance of Prof. Madhava Menon after he completed his tenure here at NLSIU, Bangalore. He was requested by the then CM of West Bengal, Jyoti Basu, to model a law school akin to the Bangalore one in Kolkata too. Gradually, NLSIU was a movement that snowballed to give rise to more than 17 distinct law schools in the country.
“Arguably, it is a fact that the eminence of a Nani Palkhivala, M C Setalvad or M Hidayatullah was produced not because of law colleges but in spite of them”
A unique reason for the success of the law school is that in the last six years there has been no political intervention at all in the working of the institute. Persons in power have acknowledged that “the National Law School is a jewel in the crown of Karnataka and is an institute of national character, doing wonderful work, so let us not interfere.” Hats off to persons in public life who never interfered in the workings of the institute. The faculty have been given autonomy even in devising course content. Here, the faculty are the captains who, in consultation with senior professors of our Academic Review Committee, work on the syllabus with complete noninterference.
But the problem was that when you are doing it on rotation, every year you are back to square one as setting up of the test has to be done by one law school which is conducted as per their terms. So, why not we improve on CLAT and permanently establish a common institutional body that has the expertise to conduct CLAT examinations annually? Establishing a permanent CLAT body would enhance the value of CLAT itself, something on the lines of UPSC exams. The acid test for any institute is to restore confidence. We have to uphold people’s confidence in these institutions, especially the established ones, so as to prevent diluting of standards. The responsibility is on us to restore the functionality of these institutions.
“A visionary called Ramakrishna Hegde, former CM of Karnataka always said, “If Delhi be the political capital of India, Mumbai, the financial capital, Bangalore is destined to become the intellectual capital of India”
Regarding career preferences, it is often quoted that NLSIU is churning out graduates that aim for the corporate sector. It may be true enough, but not enough of the truth. Students do opt for the corporate sector during the initial three to five years and make enough money. But then they quit and join litigation, falling back on the money earned during the initial five years of their corporate career. This money comes handy during their gestation period, when they start practising as litigation advocates. It requires at least three to five years to establish oneself as a litigation lawyer. The reality is that today a good number of students are quitting their lucrative corporate mantles and joining the litigation field because they realise that there is money in the corporate sector but not enough work satisfaction. Although, the standard of living is important, standard of life is more important. After all, compared to the corporate sector, litigation advocacy offers ample challenge.
Law is an evolving subject. In 1988, there was nothing called competition law. Today you also have, say an MRP Act and NLSIU primarily focuses on these emerging trends including environmental law. Certain concepts which were unknown, such as IP laws and patenting, all these changes are immediately incorporated in our module. Amartya Sen launched his new book on 26th August, 2015 and in September itself, we started a course on that book. Our focus is on the intellectual welfare of the students. We are not bothered as to who delivers it. We believe in the dictum that you can do anything in your life as long as you don’t mind who takes credit for it.
Evolving the curriculum even within existing modules by maintaining topicality is a challenge. But we believe that the job of a teacher is not to cover the syllabus but uncover it. The syllabus is only part of the curriculum and one has to attend and see the experiments that our teachers conduct in classrooms to actually believe it. If the SC passes a verdict on uniform civil code, it becomes a module of the course content and gets incorporated immediately in our coursework. Students have to come prepared, which makes the syllabus dynamic and evolving constantly.
Our pattern of teaching was innovative right from day one, as NLSIU believed in innovation and not renovation. Compared with any traditional law college, the founding fathers of the institute had a long term vision to impact changes via its curriculum and maintain topicality. They devised a trimester system that was alien to law colleges then and perhaps, this is the only law school where you have a trimester system. Each year, you have three semesters and this is a five year course. In each semester you have four papers which implies that you have to work on 12 papers every year and 60 papers by the end of the 5th year in your chosen subjects. Nothing unusual, but in these 60 papers, each student is required to write a compulsory project which is topical.
For example, if I am a criminal law teacher, I will immediately give my students a project on the legality of Yakub Memon’s execution. The student is required to consult the teacher. This way, both the student and the teachers are kept on their toes which encourages continuous deliberation to arrive at any palpable solution even at the campus level. Thus, a student writes 60 projects - all on emerging topics such as the changing environmental law, patent laws etc. By the time our student walks out of the university after five years, he would have submitted 60 projects and faced 60 vivas which would make the student’s writing and communication skills, if not consummate, near perfect. His ability to analyse, to comprehend, to interpret and his ability to put them across will be first rate.
“By the time our student walks out of the university after five years, he would have submitted 60 projects and faced 60 vivas which would make the student’s writing and communication skills, if not consummate, near perfect. His ability to analyse, to comprehend, to interpret and his ability to put them across will be first rate”
Right from day one, we had 80 seats every year for our undergraduate (UG) program and have not increased the strength in the last 27 years. NLSIU today has become a brand and we consider our students our ambassadors. Even if we increase our strength to 500, all seats would be sold like hot cakes. But this is where we are apprehensive because unless we have a foolproof mechanism for providing facilities which would augment the worth of our programs, we should not unnecessarily put the cart before the horse by increasing the number of seats. Our focus has been on quality and not quantity .Therefore, we resisted from increasing the strength of the popular UG program for qualitative mentoring of our 400 residential students.
The introduction of the revolutionary Masters in Public Policy Program is innovative in itself. This is a two-year PG program where graduates from any discipline are selected on the basis of a very qualitative all India entrance test. Our observation is that for good governance, the focus on public policy is absolutely essential and what India lacks is expertise in public policy. The gap is felt to such an extent that IAS officers are sent to the Kennedy School of Public Policy, U.S., to get an exposure to public policy during their careers. We identified that during their career tenure of five to ten years, a similar public policy program would equip our administrative officers in good governance. We decided to create a department under the School of Public Policy, which will be as good, if not better than Kennedy School. The first batch of about 47 students in 2014 will pass out in 2016. It is amazing to note that we have graduates from St. Stephens Delhi, IIT Kanpur, Jadhavpur University, Kolkata and other premier institutions. Fifty students have enrolled for the current 2015-2017 batch. We can go on to 60 students too for this program but if students do not live up to our set standards, we could terminate the program too. It is all about quality – students are selected based on screening committee, interviews etc.
As with all our other programs, we have flexibility in the type of faculty we engage and also draw expertise from outside. For our UG courses we invite IAS and IPS officers. Prof. Chakrapani, former IAS officer, Govt. of Hyderabad, took a lecture on public policy based on the Harvard model. Apart from our permanent regular faculty, the department also identifies a particular module A, B or C and a potential visiting faculty. Students gain from the diverse exposure through this program. This experiment too was successful, such that our senior students of the Public Policy Program (who are now in the second year) were invited by the ministries under the Govt. of India to intern with them. The final trump card was when under the BRICS Youth Development program, a delegation was sent to Russia in July, 2015 under PM Narendra Modi’s team. Three NLSIU students were selected as part of the team and one in a leadership capacity, which implies that our Public Policy Program has received the needed recognition.
For the first decade (1988 to 1998), we were the only law school. Therefore, today we have alumni from the first ten years who give us an advantage over other law schools. They now occupy very eminent positions. Vikram Raghav is with the World Bank, Lavanya Rajmani with the UN and Aditya Sondhi a leading practitioner in the High Court. Four of our students have been nominated as senior advocates in different high courts. Therefore, the next generation of leading advocates of the Supreme Court will be from NLSIU. When the likes of eminent person as such as Gopal Shankar Narayanan, Dayal Vishnu, Soli Sorabjee and Fali Nariman are required to hand over the batons, it will be these next generation individuals who will be taking over and they are from NLSIU. Our students occupy top positions in the corporate sector, within the UN, in the UPSC and other civil services. Our alumni also oblige by taking guest lectures.
On funding aspects, we make an appeal to our alumni and sometimes we divert money from our general fund and our statutory body’s executive council and general councils who are very magnanimous. There is no shortage of money. We also work around an Alumni Corpus Model for funding. Say, you belong to the 1998 batch –you come together and float a corpus called the 1998 scholarship and it could be a grant of Rs. 10 lakh and the interest generated from this corpus is say Rs. One lakh – this becomes the annual scholarship fund. Likewise, we have other corpus funding by different alumni batches, corporate sponsorships and scholarships.
In the past one year, you would be amazed to know that the dominance of metropolitan cities in our campus is a thing of the past. People from small towns are now joining our course .This year you hardly have any students from Delhi, a few from Mumbai but now we have students from small towns in MP, Karnataka, UP, Maharashtra, etc., which is a very important indicator of the changing trend. Our in-house scholarship committee also works with the Increasing Diversity by Increasing Access (IDIA), an outfit founded by Shamnad Basheer, an important alumnus of NLSIU who identifies law aspirants from underprivileged families. We have modified the scholarship policy so as to incorporate social safety net to increase participation in our UG course by students from all strata. IDIA program is not just to identify students for scholarships but they also prepare poor students after identifying them, and coach them for CLAT. They also help these students to identify law schools for possible admissions. Our existing students also mentor and sometimes these classes are also held at our campus. All logistic facilities are provided by us for underprivileged students in the IX and X grade to help prepare them for CLAT.
Apart from the cumulative compulsory papers that need to be submitted which accounts for only 25 percent of work done, students also take up single credit or seminar courses. One hallmark of our continuing experimentation is to either invite an eminent speaker from public life, who might also volunteer to conduct classes at NLSIU. The guest is accordingly invited to stay at our campus for a week and students who enrol for these single credit courses gain points that are added on to the main mark sheet. Likewise, a student can take three to four seminar courses or single credit courses. By the time a student completes his 5th year, these courses reflect on his final marks statements in addition to his regular grade status. These credit or seminar courses also help our students while applying for a seat at Yale or Harvard. This ensures an industry and academic connect which also makes life at the campus more lively.
We now have a one year Master of Laws (LL.M) program that offers 50 seats and is strictly residential. Earlier this was a two year program, which has been reduced to a year following UGC norms. We also have non-residential PhD programs and our distance education program. NLSIU is perhaps the only university which offers a two-year Master of Business Law (MBL) program through distance education. The beauty of this program is that though it is a Masters degree in law, we do not require any prior LLB (Bachelors) qualification to enrol for this program. Here we teach you IP (intellectual property) rights, patent law, environmental law, facets of company law, securities, and acquisitions and ventures, etc. Most IAS officers, IPS officers and doctors join this course. Apart from this, we have six PG diploma courses which include diploma in human rights, cyber law, environmental law and IP law. The other programs come under our regular LLB, LLM and PhD curricula and were established in 1988.
Our teachers also reside at the campus and are available for consultation from 2 p.m. onwards which is unique in comparison to regular law colleges. What happens after class hours is more important than what happens during class hours! The job at NLSIU is 24/7. Whether it is mentoring students by the faculty or delivering lectures, there is no binding on time. Faculty can be approached even at 9 p.m. Class attendance is compulsory and in order to incentivise the students, we also give them five marks for 100 percent attendance. Therefore, students too do not like to miss even a single class here.
We expose our students not only to subjects in law but also to the wisdom of experts in law, as law is a holistic subject. Flexibility of class working hours is another wonderful feature of our institute. For instance, we had P Sainath of The Hindu for one full week, and he conducted a seminar course which was outside the purview of our syllabus. But our students gained from their interactions with P Sainath and from similar workshops with eminent experts like N Ram and Ramchandra Guha. Although, a typical day starts at 8.15 a.m. and goes on up to 1.30 p.m., we say working hours are flexible to the extent that our library is open till 3 a.m. at night. Even at 1 am, you may see at least 100 students up and working. The holistic pattern of learning and interactive activities can go on till 11 pm and the learning never stops here. Here, everyone works with pleasure and not under pressure.
Let me confess that the younger generation in India is extremely talented and we cannot let them down. My advice is that even when you study law, the first question you must ask is, “Is it right?” and not, “Is it lawful?” and one that justifies your conscience. Your approach should be on permanent values and not temporary valuations. So, we as teachers have a responsibility, as education is not information but the formation of a complete human being.
An achievement becomes meaningless once you have achieved it and today’s knowledge being tomorrow’s ignorance are the two challenges that we have. The greatest challenge for the faculty is constant updating of skills, as law is changing at an exponential pace. As one jury remarked “NLSIU is in the danger of becoming a victim of its own success!” It is like Sachin Tendulkar going to bat, and every time he is expected to score a century, forgetting that he is a human being. Likewise, we are expected to be nothing short of super excellent – in terms of increasing expectations and benchmarks, which keeps us on our toes. We want to aspire to the next level and one day be able to say that NLSIU Bangalore will become the benchmark for Harvard – a formidable task, but I do enjoy the prospect!
I come from a very big Telugu speaking joint family and spent the first 21 years of my life in the border town of Andhra Pradesh, Berhampur (in Odisha) -- also home town of former Indian President, V. V. Giri. Our family migrated to Berhampur about four generations ago. I completed my M.A. (English Lit.) and UG program in Law from Berhampur University. I completed M.L (International Law) under the tutelage of the internationally renowned Prof. B.S. Murthy. I immediately joined as faculty in 1978 and had an uninterrupted innings of 31 years until May 2009. Because of my filial obligations, I could not move out of Vishakhapatnam which is 160 kms from Behrampur, as I was the eldest son in a family of 11 siblings. My father was a doctor. Post the demise of both my parents in 2007, we pledged and donated our ancestral property to Sri Venkateshwara Institute of Medical Sciences, Tirupathi. I come from a family of music lovers, especially Carnatic classical music. We have dedicated an annual award for upcoming musicians in memory of my mother who was an exponent in this art, and have called it the M.S. Subalakshmi award. I never think of tomorrow and do the best I can today and I have no complaints against God.
by Sangeeta Ghosh Dastidar
