The difference in how seriously students take their work in different settings was jarring to me too. It was a real struggle to just get students to listen and not tune out the information that would be critical for them to be good lawyers. For a while now I have had a bi-modal curve with students either being very interested and invested and working hard, or students just not caring about their work at all and slacking off and behaving poorly and not showing integrity when it came to things like unfair means or plagiarism.

What is surprising though is that even the latter group will talk about how they want good professors who have had fancy law degrees from world universities- but then end up treating them quite badly.
I think there might be several issues at play. I think we should culturally make it okay for students to fail. differently placed students experience failure differently and thats partly why they resort to cheating or corrupt practices. I think also senior students often end up teaching the newer batches pretty toxic stuff.

I wonder also if the integrated BA LLB model is actually doing us harm. I went to a good five year law school and worked hard for my degree and was honest throughout, but I know that was not the case with my batchmates, there were leaked papers, plagiarism everywhere, literally a database of seniors projects you could "borrow" from, more and more cheating in exams, and increasingly more and more petitions to get professors who pushed us fired. We were just too young to value the opportunity before us. We felt like prisoners because none of us knew why we wanted to do the law at all, and we behaved that way, trying to outsmart the guards instead of trying to actually learn.

I'm not sure 17 is a good age for students to commit to a legal education, I have always had slightly better experiences with more mature students- masters students in any discipline. Maybe we should bring back the BA Hons and then a 3 year LLB programme.

the other thing I think the industry could do is actually demand more from young entrants into law firms than just being a human who would work for 16 hours a day nonstop. Perhaps they should actually demand that they know the law. As it is at the top law school where almost everyone is assured a job, there really is no hunger to learn or improve or prove oneself. The brand tag will carry you through so why not spend 5 years smoking grass and grabbing ass and drinking fast no? The worrying thing is increasingly jobs are not guaranteed even to graduates of top law schools and students live in a denialist bubble about this.

I had a much more joyful time actually teaching students in newer universities and less established schools because they were hungry for knowledge and they knew how competitive and uncertain their legal future was, so they took seriously the work of learning as much as they could.

That’s the point I think. Is it fair to ask female faculty to extend themselves to do care work at all? Have not make faculty at these institutions said this and much worse and been hailed as taskmasters and great teachers? She absolutely addresses her own short comings. I’ve heard the recordings and you can tell from her tone that she was not threatening anyone. She used unparliamentary language- but not in anger- it’s clear she was just telling students to not take advantage of her to assume they could commit academic malpractice without consequences.

Not everything that informs students about consequences is a threat.

Yeah I think you need both kinds of law teachers - research scholars to teach broad survey courses and discussions seminars, and practitioners to teach specialised courses and clinical courses and capstone projects. And I think shutting doors between the profession and academia is harming us. We need to do better.

What’s worse is because these two camps are so divided each camp generally has not nice things to say about the others. While academics are accused of living in ivory towers and not knowing the practice of law, practitioners are accused of getting by on jugaad and not knowing the law itself thoroughly, and perhaps of making unethical choices. And this seeps into how students behave at internships and in classrooms. In the end we’re not building a community that has a common goal but one which is deeply divided and not doing enough to equip the kids with
all the skills they would need to be better than we are at this law thing.

It’s not identity politics for the sake of it right ?

It’s talking about identity as a way to think about how the institution affects different people differently. And that should be fair game. I know as a woman I have been slotted into sister/ mother role in academic settings. Even when I have the best qualifications in the room no one will compliment my intellect - only how nice I am. I know that male academics in my experience have less trouble maintaining class discipline.

I know that not having enough scholars rise through the ranks who do belong to diverse communities affects our research. The law isn’t like math- not all answers to questions are going to be the same. In fact the questions we ask when we see a problem might be different based on our own place in society. It’s a messy human affair and I think in trying to flatten that messiness by saying well identity doesn’t matter , we just lose a lot of knowledge. Identity isn’t everything, but it is something.

It matters that most people go through law school not having read Ambedkar. I graduated from a top law school and it wasn’t till much later that I read any Ambedkar. I was a worse scholar before I had and law school didn’t prepare me enough cause all my savarna men profs did not think it was worth teaching Ambedkar.

Pointing to individual exceptions I think only emphasises the rule.

Long response, since the piece makes several points that are relevant to reflect on, and which were some of the reasons I found it difficult to commit to academia full time:

I did my LLM in 2008-09 and had to fund it myself (with some support from the university I went to), since I didn’t have the social capital to figure out how to get the better known scholarships. Back then I thought I was just too stupid for them. I'm a first generation lawyer from a single parent home, and my mom had limited means. We still rue that she didn’t have money to attend my graduation for instance, although she did pull out all the stops for the essentials. So the financial stability - being able to pay my loans and care for her after graduation - was critical for me, and the economics in academia didn’t make sense.

I began to work with a law firm but also signed up for teaching commitments for core and elective courses at various schools, broadly between 2009-2018. When I began, I was young, I had to negotiate hard with my firm to commit time to teaching, I thought I was good at what I did, and so I was disappointed that my teaching experience was mixed. The smaller seminar classes usually had very interested students. In the core classes, while there were committed folks, it was sometimes a struggle to get students to do the basics like get bare acts to class. I used to spend a lot of time and effort just thinking about how to engage them. So I constantly asked myself the same question - how is it that during the LLM there was this expectation that people would prepare and show up, and they did, and why was it such a challenge here, when they were evidently capable of applying themselves otherwise? It isn't easy to ask yourself this again and again without doubting yourself.

Students operate under stresses of their own and I strongly believe that their attitudes are usually not driven by mal-intent (there were folks who failed my class and then came to me to confess that they had gone to admin to get their grades bumped because they couldn’t afford a repeat - the admin those days used to process these requests without consulting or informing the teacher). There were some who were obviously dealing with mental health issues. But there was also sometimes a lack of seriousness and maturity in relation to the classroom space which can be depressing when you invest so much of yourself into conceptualising and preparing. When the classroom experience clicks, it is electrifying and helps you engage more deeply with your subject, but very often it feels like an uphill task to just get through. I also had a difficult time dealing with plagiarism concerns, with limited support from the admin, which put me off teaching for a while.

There needs to be a fix for this situation which results from a combination of factors, where teachers have high teaching and admin loads, students are young, maybe still finding themselves, and universities still often spaces where power functions in traditional ways. I don’t have an answer, but my workaround (a personal choice) has been to never fully commit to either world. Academia gives you a lot to be optimistic about and I have found it important to not let go, although I now prefer to teach less and read and write more. In retrospect I also think that my experience as a practitioner has fed into my academic work and vice versa, but that's a separate conversation. But the choice involves trade offs. It means that your place in either world (“progress”, if you want to think about it in a linear fashion) will never be at par with those who do either full time. But if that situation leaves you happier at the end of the day, perhaps that’s ok. Thanks Megha, for initiating the conversation.

Isn't the point that academia while claiming to be representative or researching discrimination and the like, both for women and for non-savarna castes, that it is still quite a bubble where the majority in senior positions are privileged and male? One Ambedkar does not change the reality on the ground nowadays.

"During my undergraduate years, most of the famous academics I was inspired by were conventional savarna intellectuals"

"the people in charge of decision-making continue to be older, cis-gendered heterosexual men."

"one must slot oneself ito an asexual, mother/sister-coded role"

Bringing identity politics is completely unnecessary here. How does it matter what caste/religion the professors/lawyers who inspired her were? She could equally have been inspired by Ambedkar (Dalit), Flavia Agnes (Christian), Shohini Ghosh (queer and Sadgop caste), BS Chimni (Sikh) or Andre Beteille (multi-ethnic). Also, some of the worst oppressors of women have been women. I can name certain women in charge of NLUs, including one named on a current thread, who is not savarna (not even Hindu, in fact). Such wokeism distracts from her main argument.

Damn, this hit home. I am that person she speaks of who will eventually go on to gatekeep academia - the upper caste, male, fluent-in-English, foreign master-PhD, academic (but not in India).

Especially where she says that practitioners say that academics are not 'real lawyers' seems very peculiar to India because a large number of law firm partners have PhDs and a large number of professors are law firm partners abroad. This batshit crazy rule of BCI to bar practice of academics does way more harm than good. Even for those who are full-time academics and in legal theory, nobody questions their legal mind saying they would not survive in court - precisely because their articles are cited by lawyers in courts.

Further, unlike most foreign countries, we do not even have a single academic on the Supreme Court even when there is a constitutional provisions to do so. Combined with the meagre pay, why in the world should anyone be in academia in India? That is not sacrifice, that is stupidity, unless you are willing to strive to change the system completely - which you cannot do singlehandedly.

Came across this recent piece today : https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/why-i-left-my-job-in-academia-for-corporate-law-firm-8264642/lite/

I know the author has lately caused some controversy with her behaviour, and she admits that she hasn’t been the perfect teacher. But would it be worthwhile to take a beat to actually reflect on what’s going on in law schools?

Are female professors really this overburdened with care work? Reflecting back on your law school days do you think people treated female faculty differently?

Why is there a culture of dishonesty and “jugaad” rather than academic integrity? Did you cheat or use unauthorised means or plagiarise for work in law school? Why/ why not?

Is it just because students are under so much pressure with so much work or is it because there is a culture of dishonesty? What can we do to address this problem?

How does the academy reform to keep its young faculty who come in with idealistic notions about what their day to day job should be like?

Do we open up law teaching to practitioners at least a bit more than we are doing now so that people don’t have to make hard choices about teaching or practising and can do so side by side?