My list. The criteria are research + publications + leadership positions + reputation + prestigious positions outside college (e.g. Facebook board and Delhi Judicial Academy head) + public perception and acclaim.

1. Sudhir @ NLSIU
2. Mrinal @ NLSIU
3. Liang @AUD
4.Nigam @ Munjal
5. Anup @ NLUD
6.Aparna @NLSIU
7. Chauhan @ NALSAR
8.Rahul @NLSIU
9. Prabhash @ SAU
10. Bhuwania @JGLS

This is a potentially interesting and valuable discussion, but please keep it clean and avoid this degenerating into trolling about which professors you don't think belong on a list, which is, of course, largely subjective. As such, moderation levels will likely be strict on this thread.

However, please do share links or details of research or personal anecdotes and other relevant information about professors - including perhaps some less well-known ones - who you might deserve to be on such a list. I.e., if in doubt, please aim to keep the tenor of posts positive and constructive rather than negative. 🤗

How is this valuable discussion exactly? All that's being done here is name dropping and claims made in favour/against without any tangible objectivity. I might as well say that Mr. X from University Y makes the list. How is that even credible, especially since the commentators are anonymous and hence lack authority to provide even informed opinion about others?

While she is perhaps emeritus prof now, I'm surprised there hasn't been a mention of prof Amita dhanda here.
Additionally, I really think this list should contain yp and arul from NLUD. Fantastic people, smart, accomplished a lot both teaching and research wise.
Colored by my bias, but cool how some batches of nlud have had the privilege to be taught by or work with like 5 of the top 15 faculty.

This a futile discussion and will only lead to needless mudslinging. Professors cannot be rated objectively. People with a hundred peer reviewed publications may be abysmal at explaining the law to students while a freshly minted assistant professor could be a student favourite for being able to teach well. The parameters are also entirely nonsense. Why is public perception important? Some of the best professors are those who devote their time exclusively to teaching and research with no public presence. Isn't the very first name on your list somebody whose understanding of constitutional law was firmly set aside by the supreme court?

I have a lot of respect for SidChau, but if the parameters mentioned in that comment are to be adhered to, then he might not make this list yet. His reputation and 'public perception' (whatever that means) as a teacher are stellar, but he has been forced to neglect his research and publications so far to help the institutions that he has been a part of. Nor has he held any prominent leadership position till date, though I really hope he gets to do so in future. I also agree with Bird about it being impossible to have such an objective ranking of faculty. At the most, you can rank their publications with some degree of accuracy. Another person similar to SidChau who might not make the list because of same problems would be Saurabh Bhattacharjee at NUJS. I am also not sure about the number of quality publications that Liang may have to his credit lately. It might be that I have not come across those, so if anybody in the know mentions a few, I would happily stand corrected. He does not seem to have a Google Scholar account or the like.
Interestingly, almost everyone mentioned in the list barring Rahul and to a certain extent Prabhash, is associated with public law. Possible bias in terms of compilation or popular coverage?

Why you hating on him bro? He’s a damn institution at nalsar. His classes are basically the most interesting and rigorous ones at the uni. Every year students fear that he might up and leave. He’s shepherded hundreds of students through career choices and helped them get into llms abroad.
He’s still early career , he has time to write.

If you are from NALSAR, then please go back to your classes, because you seem to be lacking in basic interpretive skills if you consider 1.3 to be "hating on" SidChau. If anything, the guy keeps saying how good he is. The point of him having not published enough to rank with the likes of some of the others named in that list still holds true, just as the one about him not having held external positions of responsibility yet does. Of course, the parameters originally referred to are themselves questionable. People who devote time to rigorous academic research would not have time for a lot of classroom teaching or student handholding, people who are made to bear admin burden won't have time for research and so on. That's true for academics across the world. One of the major reasons why foreign academics on an average produce more better quality research is that their teaching workload across all levels is much lesser than our academics. Allows them to focus on quality. Also, the foreign universities or even some of the Indian ones (none of the NLUs though) now actually employ capable admin staff.

This post serves no purpose. Hardly few of the 10 profs mentioned there will find a place in top 10 in India till Upendra Baxi, MP Singh, BB Pande, Ved Kumari, Kamala Sankaran, BS Chimni, Amita Dhanda, Faizan, Desai, Panda etc. are active and teaching. It seems you included only NLUs. Places like DU, JNU and Jindal have some of the best law professors in the country.

As someone who has been in classes of some of the folks you’ve mentioned. Let me just say that they’ve lost touch and it’s about time to retire already. They have just stopped reading and engaging with scholarship that’s out there. And hearing about how they did things in the good old days gets boring really fast.
And some of them ( what is FM doing on your list?) actually don’t hold a candle to these younger folks. People just don’t like saying it because they want idols to worship. I’d rather be in mrinal/ aparnas/ anups class than Ved Kumari, baxi, faizan or dhanda.

I kind of agree with Haha. While Baxi was perhaps a legend in his own days, anyone who has attended any of his lectures [...] With all due respect, his lectures are [...] unlike some of the names in the list. I am speaking as someone who turned up to his class with interest, not as an uninterested kid in class.
But on the whole, I hope this turns into a nice forum for us to discuss and celebrate our best teachers and not throw mud on other institutions/turn this into an unnecessaryfight.

Weird that you missed out on Raj Kumar from JGLS and included Bhuwania from JGLS. Kumar is a scholar of his own standing. Just because he is involved in the administration of JGLS cannot be a reason to preclude his research and publication and he still offers courses at JGLS every once in a while.

"Raj doesn't teach anymore. And for what it's worth, he's being abused on LinkedIn by Jindal kids a lot for his decisions".
If he isn't teaching anymore then they have grudes with Raj the admin and not Raj the Prof. The two are very different creature and you should not judge one on basis of the other.

A better question to ask is which are the law schools with best faculty. NLSIU and JGLS are undoubtedly gold standard. Some of the rest are bronze, most are iron, lead and tin. Not saying which law school goes where since Kian asked us not to be negative. But you can look at bios and see for yourself. That's all.

I bow down my head in reverence to all teachers who have taught me. It is indeed a matter of great thankfulness that I got a chance to be educated. Have been lucky to be taught by Prof Kamla Sankaran- what a wonderful teacher she is. Taught us Constitutional Law at CLC, DU. Teachers are priceless and we owe our all to them.

I believe JGLS has best 9/10 professors and it has a lot of them.

But

NLS has the professors whom i would rate 10/10 but they are fewer in number.

CLC has a bunch of less-renowned but very experienced professors. Very underrated.

My ratings (not based on professors but university) would be:-

JGLS>NLS>CLC>GLC>NUJS>NALSAR>NLUJ>Symbi pune> GNLU

If you wish to disagree, please be respectful. These are my personal opinions based on my personal experience and the reality might be entirely different

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NLSuite

Jindal HAD good professors but not anymore. I study there and the quality has dropped drastically. Most good ones left
Since we got the IoE tag, we have 24 year old kids who have done their LLM from random degrees come and teach. They're taking full courses and can't teach at all. Heck, my ADR prof kept confusing seat v. venue v. place.
For 10 sections in a batch, each section will get 1 good prof for every 5 courses. Do the math and you'll know what a shithole it is.
P.S. Kian might not publish this because his cash flow depends on Raj. He hasn't covered a single issue reported to him :)

This was fairly obvious even to those of us who left the uni recently. The admin's focus on foreign LLMs is questionable to say the least, especially when we're being QMUL and King's are our feeder colleges. Like @Jiggles said, the majority of teachers are practically kids themselves, with naught but an LLM from the most basic of UK colleges, with no teaching experience. No offence meant to anyone who's worked their way into a masters, but the run of the mill UK LLM courses do not have the rigour that warrants a teaching post.

People do not really become good teachers because of a 10-month long foreign LLM. The good ones already have most of the ability and focus, and the LLM just gives them additional exposure to how things work in another jurisdiction. Regardless of the pedigree of the college from where they do that LLM.

Very strange that no one is talking about Lawrence Liang. In terms of intellect, research, publications and impact on society, Lawrence is the #1 legal academic in India today under 60 years of age. He is the only person other than Shamnad Basheer to win the Infosys Prize and the only law professor in India to be invited by Kaushik Basu to deliver the KC Basu lecture at NUJS (succeeding Nobel laureates like Amartya Sen and Joseph Stiglitz). Proof given below. Lawrence's impact is far more than Sudhir, Mrinal etc.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nos5GgBx4p0[/youtube]

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvUHyyAyag8[/youtube]

There are 20 law subjects. Each area has 5-6 good faculty members. How can you find 10 best? Each subject is important. You should find out best in the field in:

Constitutional law
Jurisprudence
Corporate law
Criminal law
IPR
Taxation
International law
Family law
Property
Evidence
Human Rights
Cyber law
Environmental law
Trade law
Contract, etc. etc.

It's apparent that this is a very exclusionary list prepared inside the NLU echo chamber. That is the only explanation I can think of to exclude authorities in academia like Prof. Ved Kumari, Prof. Kamala Sankaran, Prof. L. Pushpa Lakshamanan (last two being Fullbright scholars) who are currently teaching in the Faculty of Law, University of Delhi.

Bar & Bench once did a faculty ranking of 21 NLUs, but it can only be accessed by subscribers. Can anyone share the rankings?

https://www.barandbench.com/columns/law-school-insights-faculty-special-who-has-best-faculty

There is actually a dearth of good commercial law subject professors in India. Knowledge and teaching wise, the good ones are perhaps Rahul Singh (Competition, NLS), AK Rai (Banking, NLUD), Yogesh Pai (IP, NLUD), Arul (IP, NLUD) and one Contract or Corp Professor at NUJS, Prabhash Ranjan (Arb, SAU). This is NOT to say NLUD has great corp training or is the best corp oriented place by any measure. We really need to introspect and see why as a country do not have enough commercial/corp law profs in our colleges.

LI readers are being cruel and unfair to Lawrence Liang. I have reported comment 14.1.1 Lawrence has not been "convicted" of anything. What happened was an internal departmental finding which cannot be called a "conviction" and has no legal weight. Lawrence has also challenged the finding in the Delhi High Court and is being represented by no less than Mr Jawahar Raja, eminent senior counsel. When Wikipedia has made it clear that unsubstantiated defamatory allegations against Lawrence cannot be published, I fail to understand why LI is not following this and publishing such comments. I request LI to adopt practices by Wikipedia and LI readers to be careful, because such comments are liable under both civil and criminal defamation law
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Lawrence_Liang

As lawyers and law students, you all know that a man is innocent until proven guilty by a court of law. So please respect this principle. You are also getting one side of the story. Thousands of lawyers and human rights activists can vouch for Lawrence's character. Even the legendary feminist activist Prof Nivedita Menon has expressed concern over the lack of due process followed in Lawrence's case and the so-called LOSHA list by Raya Sarkar, which started this witchunt. No one even heard of Raya Sarkar prior to the list and she has no track record of human rights activism. She was just a fresh graduate from Jindal Law School (a law school only for the rich and privileged). On the other hand, Prof Menon is a living legend and the godmother of feminist scholarship in India.
https://kafila.online/2018/03/10/in-the-wake-of-the-aud-report/

Under the Modi government, human rights activists have been persecuted non stop and false cases have been filed. We are seeing what is happening with Disha Ravi. I am not saying that Lawrence is being hounded by the Modi government, but he is one of the topmost human rights activists in India and it would be very convenient for the government to get him out of the way. You should also know that the controversy involving him happened soon after he spoke at the JNU protests with Kanhaiya Kumar.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqxpmqAPwk8[/youtube]

I have presented another side of the story. I don't know if LI will publish the comment or not. I just hope we will all learn to be kind and do better by giving everyone a fair hearing and respecting the rule of law.

Lawrence is a good man who has spent his whole life serving the cause of the poor, instead of joining a law firm and selfishly minting money. All he needs is a fair hearing before being stoned by a mob, that's all.

Oh, so now the prescribed human rights standard is that your allegation and its gravity matter less than your degrees and qualification. Good to know! As for Liang not having been 'convicted', sure he has been. By the departmental committee allowed to be the first forum for matters like this. The fact that the finding has not yet been set aside by any court of law means that it is legal enough. By your logic, until a 12 judge SC bench decides on this matter, one cannot talk about this.

I like how you italicise the word "teachers", because from what I hear the "good" professors rarely teachat NLUD. They just do research, while PR bots from the college claim they have the highest number of alumni faulty etc (not true any more as NLSIU now has most alumni faculty).

You’ve heard wrong. The professors named above do teach atleast one subject in an academic year. And most of them offer seminar courses for the senior batches every year. Nearly every batch till 2020 has been taught by atleast a few of them.

As far as NLU alumni going to NLS is concerned, it’s only Aparna and Mrinal who’ve left NLUD for NLS and they come as a package deal anyway.
I don’t see anyone claiming anymore that NLUD has the most NLU alumni teaching so you’re unnecessarily bringing it up again. Even then, the teachers who are still around are still pretty decent (even some of the non-NLU graduates). Maybe you should put your caustic feelings towards NLUD from the past aside and move ahead to more important issues.

Personally, I have never calculated whether NLUD or any other law school has the most NLU alumni teachers or not. It’s an entirely pointless exercise (which the trolls on this website seem to enjoy) as far as I am concerned. NLUD probably never did, so maybe you’re right.

My point was just to emphasise that there aren’t really any comments I’ve seen on this thread about NLUD having the most number of NLU alumni teaching. So you bringing it up was unnecessary and irrelevant.

Daniel Mathew is exemplary. Firm but fair. Articulate without being verbose. Probes you harder without patronising. Well read yet humble enough to acknowledge lack of personal knowledge.

Patient to a fault. Can't vouch for his scholarship but his erudition and delivery is impeccable.

Have to agree on the faculty you mentioned. However, in response to the allegation that they seldom teach, its wrong. While Aparna and Mrinal aren't with us anymore and Chinmayi also isn't teaching, the others are still there and teaching, and are actually either offering a course this seminar for the UG kids or offered a course for UG previous semester.

What changes did Ved Kumari and Rangeen Bring?

implementing new exam policy where only endsems will be conducted, which have no criteria for marking?

Bringing 3 year llb, which they brought in hurry and made joke of their own by admitting them through graduation marks?

Bringing new hostel policy in which the local students will be kicked out of the hostel??

They may be good professor but a bad administrator.

They do everything without planning and in a haste.

And are they really that good cause all of your student body is against them and organising a protest against them?

No one stood against prof. Faizan?? Why ?? Because he was a good administrator and good professor.

Jgls has many. Profs Dipika Jain, Indranath Gupta, SG Sreejith, Gudmundur Eirikson, Shiv Viswanathan, Mansi Kumar, Ajay Pandey, Mathew John, etc. Check faculty page at www.jgls.edu.in

Swaminathan, JGLS. Scholar par excellence. What a guy. He's also a great teacher. He's one of the leading legal theorists of our time and perhaps the only one in India. I'm surprised more people don't talk about him.

Also, you must realise that this sort of a list is very difficult to compile. Since students' exposure to professors is largely limited to their college, it is hella difficult to make a "Best law profs in India" list. This will just be a trollish echo chamber for students yelling the names of their favourite law school profs. The only way profs can be objectively judged across the country, is through scholarship.

To decide the best professors you can't rely on students' perceptions alone. Many Professors are not in active teaching rather they do research. Secondly, all the vital info regarding them may not be known to us so this effort is absurd.

By the way, it is interesting to know which law schools has the highest number of "professors" ( regular only). Find out and share.

Tell me you've never practiced without telling me you've never practiced.

How would every single law college, approx 600 in India, find adequate number of professionals for subjects like environmental law, international law, human rights etc with 15 years of experience?? Do you want MC Mehta to teach every law school one day at a time or maybe contact ICJ for international law lawyers. Even criminal, civil and constitutional lawyers with 15 years of experience would not leave their practice worth lakhs for a measly wage that's paid to professors.

Actually, what is Sudhir's publication record? For all the fanfare, i cant think of a single defining or standing out publication that he has. Same goes for Chauhan (who is a great classroom teacher by the way), Nigam and Rahul.

Also, who makes a list of good law professors in India without Chimni. He is the most well known and respect legal scholar from India. I dont think anyone else has made the sort of impactful contributions that he has.

indeed, sudheer has publications. Indeed they are good, but thats it. But what has been the impact of those publications? how much has it influenced other scholars and thinkers? what is his contribution to legal thought? I dont think his scholarship is not worthy enough to put him in a list of top scholars. very good scholar - but not a top one.

I think he is known more for his work in area of #emergencypowers overseas, and in JGLS itself he is mostly known for Criminal Procedure and Evidence. He used to teach an elective on Law and Psychedelics but I think he has stopped it now. Cannabis decriminalization is just one of the things he is doing. We should take a look at the entire body of work someone has done before labelling them.