Atleast 6 JGLS students have got into the incoming LLM batch of Cambridge (these are the people that I know of through linkedin this might not even be the entire list) so are you gonna say JGLS better? Universities play a very minimal role, it’s mire about the application. From what I know amity’s law school has the most student in India going abroad for LLMs. Some of these students get into ivy leagues as well. Let’s stop giving credits to universities because in this process we undermine the efforts of students. We very well know that in order to get into oxbridge you need to have a gpa of more than 7.8/8 throughout the law school which in itself is a daunting task. Then you have to have multiple judicial internships and academic pieces in reputed journals. No university has any role in all of this. If you told me that these NALSAR kids had no credentials but only got into Oxford because of the name of their university, I would have had believed this argument holds some merit. But these are super talented people with gold and silver medals, don’t undermine their labour.

@Kian: Why is comment 5 marked trollish? It is a statement of aspiration and does not disparage any other institution. Even though I am from another law school, it is absolutely fine for faculty, students and alums from NALSAR to aim for the top ranking in NIRF.

You say you dont want to take anything from the students and exactly two paragraphs later wonder if they have gotten through because of grade inflation or something "sinister". While you make some valid points about faculty attrition, the other parts of your comment reek of the pungent smell of troll viz. the BCL being a cash cow and people getting through easily if they dont apply for funding. BCL is Oxford's flagship programme and I assume they wouldn't want to admit people only because they can pay.

This does not, however, mean that I agree with the fantasy that OP has written in their post about NLS and NLUD being scared and other shit.

Good for NALSAR, but I fail to see what merits the fanfare. Couple of years ago, the Harvard LLM Batch had 6 students from another NLU. Another NLU has probably sent the highest number of students among NLUs to the Ivy League places. Did not find them creating a ruckus about such things. If the students are good and want to pursue higher studies and have got the necessary breaks, then this would happen. Good thing, but nothing worth getting so excited about.

Regarding your point about NLS, this 2020-2021 batch received acceptances before covid hit. So, covid could not have been a factor in their decisions.

Regarding grades - as a student, I can assure you that grade averages are declining with each new batch. There have been many new hires in the past few years with fancy LLM degrees and NLU backgrounds (not equating NLU teachers to better personally, but that's what a lot of legally india comments say) with very high standards. Especially since the students are from different batches, your point doesn't even hold weight. If it were true, then 7 students from 2017 onwards would be getting in every year, no?

Regarding Faizan and Dhanda - they have been very active in getting foreign visiting faculty and great electives in recent years, which is resulting in an increasing non-corporate sway (so, more LLM applicants rather than corp folx). Prof. Chauhan (especially) and the new LLM hires actively help students perfect their applications through a lot of their own hard work.

Regarding faculty - most left for their PHDs abroad or other personal reasons. No faculty has left from being so annoyed with the students or the administration (except one alum in 2020 who was hated by students for not knowing how to teach anyway, no big loss). As a student, I've had fantastic faculty in the past few years, including foreign faculty and well known Supreme Court lawyers. You can say it's denial or whatever, but this "massive faculty attrition" is not actively affecting me or other students. People should really learn to stop forming conspiracy theories and focus on their own work, wow

By this logic, you'd stop celebrating any achievement because they all stem from privilege? There are thousands of other privileged applicants in the world they beat out for such an opportunity, stop being salty. They deserve some amount of praise for their hard work.

Your premise is also wrong: Tons of people who get into OxBridge are from non-privileged backgrounds, as you may have noticed from the numerous people trying to crowdfund their education. 5 of these 7 at least were on multiple scholarships that they earned (unsure about the other two), did part time jobs, and worked for a few years to fund their education from a place that is so exclusive and with such great faculty and infrastructure, people across the world dream their whole lives to be educated in it. Not everyone wants or gets a free ride on their parents' money.

If you channelize even 1% of this obsession and downplaying of XYZ law schools, into personal growth, you'd be better off, trust me! Not from a Tier-1 institution but have still landed my dream law firm internships, without any connections, instead of obsessing/crying over law school.

Not to take anything away from these students at all. And I do sincerely wish the best for them. But OP needs to calm down a bit.

We don’t know if any nls kids applied or not. Maybe they didn’t send in applications this year because of uncertainty about whether they’d get the campus experience given Covid. We also don’t know how many of these students are funded. It’s quite easy to get these admissions when you don’t ask for funding. Big programmes like this often serve as a cash cow for universities. We also don’t know if this is a trend or a one off. As far as I can see - the students admitted come from different batches- so whether or not you’ll have the same number of people applying next year or the year after that- is honestly unpredictable. I think we should wait and watch- see if there is consistency here or just an anamolous peak. We should also keep track of how many of these students then manage to get employment there/ transition to mphil/phd programmes.

It’s also unfair to project a trend and deem FM and dhanda an unequivocal success- especially when we don’t know exactly who supported these students/ what made their applications decent. However given that they have been in charge for so long. I will concede that they might have done something right. Whether that outweighs all the other stuff they’ve been up to - it’s too soon to tell.

Having said that- I do wonder if there is a more sinister reason for this spike- is there grade inflation at nalsar? Are standards for the BCL at ox changing? It is odd that they wouldn’t care about diversity enough to admit so many students from the same programme.

Regarding faculty at nalsar- I don’t think anyone would dispute that nalsar by itself could attract back alumni who want to teach. The question remains whether the institution can retain them for a significant period of time. There is a faculty attrition problem at justice city and as much as nalsar may want to ignore it or distract away from it- sooner or later it will be apparent to the whole world- not just those in the know.

Do you think that NLU students face the same issues as someone who graduated from Hazra law college with an annual fee of Rs 2,000?

NLS, the so called Gold Standard by comparison charges Rs 2,75,100 which is 138 times Hazra's fees. JGLS on the other hand charges 3 times NLS's fees and JGLS makes no noise being about accessible and is a private institution funded by a billionaire out of his own pocket. NLUs on other hand are state funded and have a mandate to be accessible. So amateur, stop downplaying JGLS, stop this obsession with law school and go work on your own self.

One of the '21 Oxford grads (Rahul Mohanty, 2017 NALSAR with 14 gold medals) is also coming back to nalsar as an assistant professor from the next semester [Along with Nalsar alum and Cambridge 2021 grad Pranav Verma]. So the claims about nalsar not being able to get its own alum to come teach is bogus as well.

But anon people on legally india gotta rage I guess

Just saw the following post by Sidharth Chauhan (Assistant Professor, NALSAR Hyderabad) on Linkedin. Sharing it in full below along with a link to the profiles of the students who are attending the BCL and MJur programmes at Oxford this year.

"As we approach the end of the 2020-2021 academic year, I am delighted to share this update. This year, there are seven alumni from NALSAR Hyderabad who will soon be completing the prestigious B.C.L. programme offered by the Faculty of Law, University of Oxford. The B.C.L. programme is equivalent to a masters in law and every year it admits promising law graduates from the various common law countries.

For the 2020-2021 academic year, there were 158 postgraduate students admitted into this programme. It is a matter of immense institutional pride for us that 7 of them are NALSAR graduates. Best wishes to Rahul Mohanty (BALLB-2017), Srimukundan Rajaram (BALLB-2017), Pranahita Srinivas (BALLB-2017), Karan Gupta (BALLB-2018), Abhijeet Rawaley (BALLB-2020), Aishwarya Birla (BALLB-2020) and Priyamvadha Shivaji (BALLB-2020) for the next stage in their careers.

I also want to commend the other Indian Law Schools whose graduates attended the BCL programme this year. In the attached document, I could find students who have completed their bachelor's degrees from NLIU Bhopal (2), JGLS Sonepat (2), NLU Jodhpur (1), GNLU Gandhinagar (1) and NUALS Kochi (1). This just goes to show that there is promising talent in all corners of our country. We have to do much more to ensure that Indian law schools can deliver a globally competitive standard of legal education to a much larger number of our students. I hope that some of these students who have had the opportunity to study abroad will eventually return and contribute to the development of Indian law schools."

https://www.law.ox.ac.uk/sites/files/oxlaw/faculty_of_law_-_bclmjur_profile_-_feb2021.pdf

Based on this information, I have the following questions for LI readers.
(1) Has any Indian Law School sent 7 students to the Oxford BCL in previous years? Some of my college alumni are telling me that places like NLS, GLC, ILS and DU-CLC have sent 2-3 students to this programme in the past. No one seems to have come close to the numbers managed by NALSAR for 2020-2021.
(2) If this has happened, how come there are no students from NLSIU, WBNUJS and NLU Delhi who went for the Oxford BCL in 2020-2021? Is it because nobody from these institutions applied?
(3) If this becomes a consistent trend, NLSIU and NLU Delhi need to seriously watch out for NALSAR in the NIRF rankings for the coming years? Since the NIRF rankings are based on the data for the previous three academic years, I am sure that this is going to reflect in NALSARs' scores for graduation outcomes.
(4) Lastly, people were worried about how other law schools would compete with the recent rounds of faculty hiring at JGLS and NLSIU. On the other hand, I regularly see LI comments trashing NALSAR for failing to attract and retain good faculty. If we go by this update, it appears that they are doing something right. Is it just that the students are that good?

Irrespective of the actual reasons, this reflects very well on the institutional leadership provided by FM and Dhanda in recent years. I hope that they will have the good sense to continue giving younger people a platform to flourish.
All in all, even if this is last year's news, it is a great moment for their institution.