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My LinkedIn is flooded with first and second-year law students writing articles for 'journals' with weird names. Why is there this mad rush to publish in law schools when these students usually know little about the law? Shouldn't the first two years be spent reading? Most of them are unoriginal and are poorly researched law school projects submitted to the 'journals' with no new thoughts. What do we do to ensure that the quality of scholarship that law students produce is not compromised without taking away from opportunities to publish?
NLSIU alum Vikram Raghvan:
It’s NLSIU fault. We committed the original sin.
NLSIU alum Murali N:
Students should worry about these pieces of writing jeopardising their futures. The internet never forgets :(
NLSIU alum Aparna Mittal:
Of so many writing samples I get (as part of hiring / internship process) most are heavily "copied and pasted". Paragraphs after Paragraphs just pasted from multiple sources with no attribution or footnotes. It's shocking
NLSIU alum Sumeet Malik:
I shudder when I see 1st and 2nd years analysing the Future Group-Amazon dispute or similar issues. Not that it’s not possible, but as a general rule at least complete studying the course in law school before writing analytical articles.
NALSAR alum Ashwin Murthy:
This form of criticism attacks the wrong player, and imo is just lazy to state - the real issue is the reason why they publish in such journals, which as others above mentioned, is because of hyper-intense competition and misaligned values/goals. As with many of the other issues that are increasingly prevalent in law schools (this craze over 'CV Value', excessive publications/competitions), there's a need to stand out in order to get jobs with "Tier 1 firms", which remains the general goal of NLUs
https://twitter.com/BhattRohin/status/1482990410305875974
This guy, at the time of our first compulsory intra moot had ranked in the 130/140s out of 180 in the batch, but when the junior batch came in he bragged about being a highly regarded mooter in his batch without any credentials.
dude was a bit of a joke in his batch and the one senior. interesting to see that he's in Harvard now for some bioethics stuff. good for him, ig lol.
The market does not need intellectual theorizing. It needs diligence and labour. These students publish papers to demonstrate a track record of diligence and labour so that they are considered a market fit for the practices they are targeting.
Let the markets fill up first, then we can think about the overspill producing intellectualist papers.
Calm all of your tits.
Quality and everything else goes down the drain when things like these are commercialized.
Ispe bhi thread?
I was thinking of starting a blog, not because of the pressure of building a good C.V, it was due to my passion for this field and its intricacies, but reading their comments really demotivated me.
In India, we have so many pointless and useless journals. Most of them would accept pretty much anything.
Having written for many journals (all SCOPUS indexed) and blogs (OBLB, Blue Sky Blog, Kluwer Arb), I can tell that no one starts their academic writing career from the likes of Harvard Law Review or NLSIR. Its fine that these "not so cool" platforms exist so that juniors are able to get some insight into academic writing. The standard of academic writing in Indian schools is terrible for most parts but that can be improved if people with experience start taking weekend sessions or the likes instead of simply bashing juniors on twitter.
Since the market has no need for that, their validation pathway is getting short-circuited, and hence the reaction.