Law schools

NUJS Kolkata has introduced a 10-seat state domicile reservation for admissions, reported Bar & Bench.

Vice chancellor Ishwara Bhat told Bar & Bench that the West Bengal government would provide NUJS with 3000 square metres of land to build a girl’s hostel, after which the academic council made the decision to introduce to quota. “Almost all law schools have some form of reservation and at NUJS, these seats are less than 10 per cent of the total seats avaialble,” Bhat said.

Only NLSIU Bangalore, NLU Jodhpur and NLU Orissa do not have state reservations, reported Bar & Bench.

The Ministry of Consumer Affairs has sanctioned a grant of Rs 1 crore to NLSIU Bangalore to build a “centre for mediation for the protection of consumers”, headed up by consumer law and practice chair professor Ashok R Patil, reported The Hindu.

In 2013 Legally India had reported that NLSIU had received Rs 8 crore from the University Grants Commission (UGC) to upgrade its facilities.

Jindal Global Law School’s debut 5-year-LLB class secured 57 jobs for its 83 graduates this year, including 12 Big Six law firm jobs.

The Bar Council of India (BCI) plans to fix a maximum limit on the number of law schools that can be started in each state of India, in a move to curb the growth of law schools with bad infrastructure adding to the already standing 1,200 law schools in India.

The Bar Council of India (BCI) plans to double the inspection fee for national law universities and law schools in metropolitan cities to Rs 3 lakh, while keeping the amount constant at Rs 1.5 lakh for other law schools.

NLSIU Bangalore and Nalsar Hyderabad final year LLB students Mansi Sood and Sanya Samtani are, respectively, among nearly 85 scholars selected by the Rhodes trust, for its Oxford University class of 2015.

A Delhi University sociology student and one economics student and one Bangalore medical student are the other Indians selected for the class. The five Indian's who have made it to this year's Rhodes class include four women.

Samtani’s profile on Oxford’s website states:

“Her primary area of interest lies at the intersection of public international law, constitutional law and critical theory. Having been a teaching assistant for public international law and constitutional law, she envisages a career in academia. Whilst in NALSAR, she served as senior editor of the NALSAR Student Law Review; editor of the Indian Journal of Intellectual Property Law, having edited a special issue on the Global South, and student editor of ILSA's International and Comparative Law Quarterly. Furthermore, she has been on the organizing committees of the NALSAR Film Festival and the NALSAR Inter Varsity Debating Championship.”

Sood's profile on the website states:

"Her interest lies in commercial law, with a primary focus on arbitration and intellectual property law. Currently serving as the Chief Editor of the National Law School of India Review, Mansi has helped in organising the Annual Symposium for the past three years. She has participated in several national and international moot court competitions and recently won the 5th International ADR Mooting Competition at Hong Kong. Besides mooting, Mansi also enjoys parliamentary debating and writing. A trained Kathak dancer, she likes to play sports, particularly badminton."

Last year law students from NLSIU and NUJS Kolkata won the Rhodes.

Hat-tip to Lawctopus for first breaking the news.

EDIT 1 December 2014: Due to an incomplete list of profiles uploaded earlier on the Rhodes class link, this story had erroneously stated that only three Indians - all women - were selected for the class of 2015. This has now been corrected.

NLU Delhi students are currently debating introducing buffalo and pork meat in its mess food menu, after the mess committee proposed the move for “diversity” in the menu, and invited student comments.

The law school’s unofficial student newspaper Glasnost states in a post from yesterday:

In a historic and bold move, the student run Mess committee is considering offering Buff (Buffalo meat) and Pork on the menu. They announced it in an email to the student body yesterday, in which they recognised it to be a contentious issue and invited opinions and objections from the students. The Mess committee in a later email stated that this move was intended to increase diversity in the menu to cater to the needs of everyone on campus. This started a lively debate with heated opinions, the email thread hit a century within a few hours. While many students responded with shouts of joy and expressed complete support, some opposed the move strongly, including threatening to leave the common Mess.

Hat-tip to Lawctopus which first reported the news.

Shamnad Basheer has won the Infosys Science Foundation 2014 prize in the humanities category today.

The former NUJS Kolkata MHRD chair professor for intellectual property (IP), founder of the Increasing Diversity by Increasing Access (IDIA) initiative and the SpicyIP blog, was awarded the prize “for his contributions to the analysis of a range of legal issues, including pharmaceutical patent injunctions and enforcement”, according to Infosys’ press release.

He has in recent years been involved in the Novartis-Glivec patent case in the Supreme Court, as an academic intervenor, and in the Delhi University textbook photocopying case.

The prize, conferred on individuals in six categories, consists of a purse of Rs 55 Lakhs, a 22 karat gold medal and a citation certificate for each category. Nobel prize laureate Amartya Sen was on the six-person jury for the prize in the humanities category. In previous years the prizes have been won mostly by academics and professors.

The Bar Council of India (BCI) yesterday notified Delhi University that it’s graduates would be allowed to enroll provisionally as lawyers, in a letter sent under the BCI’s previous chairman Biri Singh Sinsinwar, who was replaced on Saturday by his predecessor Manan Kumar Mishra, reported the PTI.

The letter signed by the BCI secretary said that enrolment would be provisional pending the decision of the BCI’s legal education committee and the BCI’s upcoming executive meeting, after the BCI had decided to derecognise DU’s three law centres in September.