We have all seen the dismal placement situation. Yet, because of certain influential professors, JGLS keeps focusing on subjects like human rights, queer studies, feminist studies, caste studies, critical theory, law and literature etc. Research centres, journals and conferences are springing up ever other day devoted to these subjects. These subjects have no relevance in the job market and the lectures are mostly full of woke, leftist jargon. When was the last time we had a proper corporate law conference?

I think it's high time for a course correction. We need to reorient the syllabus towards the job market and placements. The college should divide the whole programme into 3-4 broad clusters (e.g. Financial Law, Tech Law, Litigation and Dispute Resolution) and offer a broad basket of courses under each cluster. We can form a set of industry partners for each cluster and invite them to give lectures. That way, students will be "industry ready", in B-school jargon.

It seems to me that we are suffering because of faculty politics. The influential lobby of human rights professors want to corner all the funding/resources and do not want to cede control to the commercial law professors.

I sincerely hope the JGLS faculty and admin read my comment.

It’s not just because of the influence of certain professors. Students also want it for grade inflation and reco letters. It’s a vicious cycle. For example, I offer a course on something like Sarvarna Hegemonical Discourses in Indian Queer Jurisprudence. I get my chela students to take the course. I give them good grades and they give me good feedback in return. I reward them further with a reco letter, as such courses fetch brownie points when applying abroad. In contrast, an advanced course on company law will probably be taught by a hardass law firm bro, who will mark strictly and say FO when you ask for a reco letter.

Lol, name one professor in commercial or company law in India that produces as fantastic research as BS Chimni or Upendra Baxi and the like? It is not that the non-commercial law professors (coming to human rights point in a bit) have a strong lobby, it is that law firm partners and senior advocates produce really shoddy pieces in the name of research which would never fly in a top journal. Their academic merit is seriously questionable. This is unlike places like US, Europe, Singapore etc. where commercial law people, including judges regularly publish in top journals - something that is unimaginable in India. Just look at big law firm people publishing in Harvard Law Review and the like - ask a law firm associate to write something for it and they will shit their pants.

Now, coming to the 'influential lobby of HUMAN RIGHTS professors' point. The fact that you created a dichotomy of commercial law and human rights is telling, right? How corporate law produces inequality and hierarchy is something you will not get by reading tech law or finance law. There is no human rights vs. commercial law, there is only human rights AND commercial law; they are not mutually exclusive, unlike your spurious dichotomy might suggest. So, you have to come out of your tiny hole.

If you are so concerned about the funding - where is the private sector funding? Why do law firms not fund chairs which pay so much that Cyril bhai wants to become a professor? Non-commercial law professors are less motivated by money than commercial law people (otherwise they would have opted for other careers), so let the law firms and big tech companies establish exceptionally well-paid chair professorships. Perhaps even the great commercial law professors in institutions abroad might want to come and work in India. Would work well for everyone involved, including the students, university, teachers and the country as a whole.

It's not a lobby as much as it's about what professors want to teach. From my experience what I see is a lot of professors who want to teach human rights-related courses join Jindal. Many corporate lawyers who could teach you those subjects don't usually join Jindal because the pay is not as good as what law firms pay and no one really wants to come to Sonepat.

It's really a supply-demand issue rather than a lobby. People who know the job-oriented courses don't really join the college to teach.

Jindal prefers NLU grads with foreign LLMs and therein lies the problem. NLU folks with human rights LLMs have no option other than teaching or activism or working for left-wing think tanks. But NLU folks with an LLM in commercial law subjects can easily work in a firm or company. Thus, JGLS is hired to hire those with BALLBs from B-list colleges or mediocre NLU grads. As a result, the human rights folks at JGLS outshine the corp law folks. There are exceptions (such as NUJS gold medalist Nemika Jha, who gave up a lucrative law firm career) but they are few.