How is this trollish? LI did a story on this, where Jiggles rep actually came to comment and when asked about which university or UGC recognises those online LLMs and where are they going to place those students, ran away after saying that we are an IOE, we don't need no recognition! However, after that they started giving the same certificate to online and offline LLMs unethically and illegally.

What JGLS has achieved is indeed commendable as you have rightly said. Even more admirable considering that it is no student's first choice and the entire batch (even scholarship students) is there only because none could get into any of the actual top 10 colleges.

Good for JGLS that the parents can pay 10LPA fees for 5 years (plus another 10 LPA pocket money to live the Jindal lifestyle), then after 5 years you can get hired by JGLS as a 'Research Associate" (Successful placement!) for a year while you run around study abroad consultants who'll craft the perfect vanilla oxbridge LLM application. No doubt that the classic JGLS inflated grades will make it stand out to adcoms!

Considering all that, the fact that 5% of JGLS batch manages to get half-decent jobs is truly commendable!

1. Because of comments and PR like this, obviously.

2. Please tell us what it has achieved, exactly. It is not producing any student who has achieved more than other students from the NLUs have done (at a fraction of the cost). It is not producing any research project (like NLUD or others) despite having tons of resources at its disposal. It is not producing any good bunch of young faculties for law schools in India.

3. Top law school in terms of number of students and fees charged, sure. In what way other than that?

4. What education opportunity does it provide that others do not, exactly? As for exchange programmes and LLMs, anybody who can afford those from the top NLUs can avail of those. Nor are the JGLS students winning any scholarships that students from those places aren't winning either.

5. Superior education? Lol! In what way? Take any average JGLS student and one from the NLUs, you won't find the former doing any better. So which way is the education that they have received superior? Sure they paid more for it, but that's all.

6. Has to be highest admission, they have more than 300% of the student strength of any NLU. How many of those admissions were with scholarship? Hardly a handful. Almost anyone who can afford a foreign LLM can get one these days. That proves nothing.

7. Once again, those places are easily accessible to people who can pay for those. And what value addition has such exposure done to the students? They don't get extra jobs, don't litigate better, don't produce better research and don't win more competitions than the NLU students.

8. Yeah, they produce more papers because they are more in number. Their faculty numbers more than 10 NLUs combined. The same stats also revealed that the number of publications per faculty was less than 1. Despite their faculty getting so much greater salary, perks, incentives and reduced teaching workload. So, not greater scholarship in terms of research output, no. Half of their faculty has zero to little experience when it comes to teaching and deal in grade inflation to keep students happy.

All in all, very bad ROI for an institution that's been doing this for over a decade.

Unfair and biased observation.

I rarely visit LI but everytime the same rants against Jindal Global Law School by NLU students/ alumni. Fail to understand why?

JGLS has its own set of problems like every other Univ or law school has. But how can you deny what it has achieved in a short span of time

JGLS in a little over 10 years became India's top law school beating vast majority of NLUs and almost all private law schools of the country.

Tell me any law school barring NLSIU, NALSAR and NLU Delhi which can provide educational opportunities and exposure comparable to Jindal Global Law School in India?

JGLS offers arguably a superior education, exposure and facilities vis-a-vis any other law school in India including all the NLUs.

JGLS graduates in 2023 secured highest admissions from India in world's top 50 law schools including Oxford, Cambridge, KCL, UCL, LSE, Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, NYU, Fletcher etc.

JGLS sends approx 200 students every year for study abroad programs including Semester Exchange, Dual Degree & Summer/ Winter Schools, which no Indian law school can even think of.

JGLS students and faculty publish more scholarly papers than any other Indian law school. Actually as per Elsevier's data of Scopus indexed journal articles in law published in academic year 2022-23 by Indian Law School Faculty, Jindal faculty publishes double of what all 25 NLU faculty publish collectively.

What makes you to predict this 'Death knell'? JGLS is bound to grow beyond your imagination.

Counterpoint:

Good lawyers/students understand that definitions of "good" are not self-evident, much less any definition in language. Which is why almost all statutes begin with a definitions clause in section 2, even if the meaning is considered to be obvious.

Bad students/lawyers have no clue of this and try to be wisecracks when asked for their definition of things.

The teachers above produce the former.

If your pedagogical skills aren't producing good lawyers, then they aren't worth anything. The two names that you mentioned have produced countless good students who even after having made a name for themselves, regard their teachers highly. That's not true for Jindal. Let the alumni do something to prove their worth and then give their opinion about which teacher was great for them.

Both are wrong, and banal, metrics, imho. Who is this law teacher that is known for all their students to have achievements? Some are good, some are exceptional, some are mediocre. That is true for every law teacher.

Did they teach passionately, and get the students interested in the subject? Yes.

Were they good scholars who made critical interventions in the class? Yes.

Did they make you think critically about the subject and have a wide ranging knowledge of the discipline? Yes. That's all maters.

What you purport is not the case anywhere in India, not least Jindal.

What is it now? Certainly a world different from what it was in 2009-2014/15. In terms of education, politics, discourse, and placements and quality of students.

Old Faculty, yes. Considering everyone who has left. Abhay, Ratna, Liz Griffin, Laxmi Arya, Latika, Ashrita et. al. Please don't comment as if you know if you don't know the history.

I mean very large public universities also have student unions that will advocate for bettering standards in education and not reducing them. The nlu student body isn’t all that united in a search for excellence either - there’s plenty of kids who just await an easy o but the difference is that it’s a public university so customer service matters a lot less. At Jindal customer service is what students want. If that doesn’t change I don’t see much hope.

Every university in the history of India has tried to intimidate its students. If calling your parents about you asking for a better education is enough to scare you- how easy do you expect this to be ? Students at other universities sit on hunger strikes and put their actual bodies in harms way so that they can get a half way decent education. The admin at Jindal aren’t some exceptional goons - they’re regular goons who will always bend to what the students want. So the question I’m afraid does come down to whether students want to improve their institution and by extension themselves or they’re happy with this sad state of affairs.

UGC 7th Pay starts an Assistant Professor with 80k. That too they can only start if they have cleared NET. Further, most private universities in the country don't even offer 6th CPC salary, let alone 7th. They also make teachers take 5 classes a day and do tons of admin work and get no research funding. Jindal teachers don't have to do any of that.

Also the fact that all of their resources go into poaching. We have a very famous constitutional law and criminal law faculty that has regularly joked about how JGLS continually is in their mailboxes looking for any opportunity to get them to Sonipat along with excessive fee hikes. This would definitely have a drain on their resources which should be channelised in making a better law school. So yeah, checks out.

Well part of the issue I guess (and I admit that my knowledge of other law schools is not extensive) is that law schools have a solid student unity and solidarity. Student Bar Committees are strong and students are a collective are capable of rallying together when it matters. Perhaps size plays a major role. Smaller the Student number, easier possibility of collective action. In JGLS, by contrast, such a huge Student body prevents a strong student collective and even if one were to be formed for a cause (which was very much prevalent in the last decade), the University resorts to its age old tactics of singling out, intimidation, and calling parents. How, then, do students take charge? I have heard stories of seniors in the 2009 to 2014 batches being very proactive, politically astute, with organizing protests and movements when it was required and urgent. That seems like a totally different Jindal altogether. Perhaps the admin did a great job of crushing such possibilities.

Faculty are not leaving JGLS because of workload for sure. They only need to teach 2 days a week there and get at least twice the money compared to anywhere else in India, plus a lot of research funding. However, those aren't enough to retain good academics. Culture and standard also play a role, not to mention not having to tow the admin party line and participate in questionable PR.

JGLS kids all want to blame admin for everything. I have no love for admin either. But thoda introspection karlo. How many good qualified honest faculty have you given bad tlfqs to? How many have you tried to mess with and make their life terrible? How many of you have forced grade inflation that leads to your degree meaning next to nothing and your GPA being suspect? How many of you go into internships thinking everyone else has to cater to you instead of trying to help the firm?

You get what you put in to law school.

Back in the day nls and nalsar and nujs students protested to hold on to good faculty. Exposed financial scams in the university, really took charge of their institution and changed it for the better. Yall just complain like karens.

This is quite accurate. Jiggles is successful only at being a pipeline (prep school) for foreign LLMs, for kids from prominent (politics/government/judiciary/bar/business) families. The smarter ones of the lot (often on scholarships) were sold a very different dream (those that dropped Tier 2 NLUs for Jiggles).

Jgls has the attrition rate comparable to a law firm. The work culture is now that like a law firm - hence many faculty have quit recently and instead of getting those with experience, jindal has instead employed kids fresh out of LLMs with no work experience whatsoever. They also pay more for Oxbridge degrees - an Indian Phd with years of research and work experience now gets paid same as a kid (who went from undergrad to grad school) fresh out of a LLM from oxbridge.

This existed even before as a research profile of the faculty and not their bios. As you know, JGLS had individual faculty bios which is now discarded in favour of this and list of faculty on the JGU webpage.

Too many cooks, they say, spoil the broth, and it seems it is appropriate in this context.

I appreciate your view, but it doesn't matter which law school ▮▮▮. Before JGLS, the children of many powerful families went to Amity and GLC. They are very successful now because of their parents, with clients that even the best NLU grads from regular families cannot secure. They also all have LLMs from abroad, which allows them to gloss over the fact that they went to Amity and GLC. Similarly, JGLS graduates from rich and powerful families are doing very well. Even if they're not, they have dozens of crores in the bank and don't need to work for a living. So it's the "death knell" only for middle-class students, who are only a small minority at JGLS.

That said, there is one big risk that JGLS faces. If the Bar Council of India scraps the foreign lawyers exam or gives instant recognition to UK degrees because of the FTA, then the nepo babies and rich kids may head off to the UK to study law, instead of going to Sonipat. They currently don't because they have to appear for the exam, which deliberately has a very low pass rate.

Here are the problems with JGLS:

- VC chose the Amity/Symbi model of many students instead of the NLU model of limited students.

- Too many human rights and public law professors have been recruited by the VC (a human rights guy himself). The students are not getting trained well in subjects for which there is market demand.

-VC and Naveen Jindal have opened a bunch of white elephant schools (public policy, psychology, architecture, lib arts, journalism etc) which are bleeding the university. JGLS is forced to subsidise them.

A number of posts recently has dealt with this, but looks like all factors are pointing to the unavoidable truth: Jindal has drastically reduced in quality. Not only are the faculty sub-par (with just an LLM and no actual research or teaching experience) but even its QS ranking recently fell down by 14 places this year (from 70 in 2022 to 84 in 2023). Not to say that rankings are determinative, but just that they are indicative of the rapidly deteriorating quality of JGLS.

On top of that, with the massive influx of students, exodus of good faculty and mass hiring of mediocre ones, poor amenities, unhygienic food, claustrophobic and cramped hostels, and exorbitant fees which no longer makes any sense, it might be appropriate to say that Jindal had a good experiment going on but looks like it is the new, if somewhat marginally more sophisticated, version of Amity and Lovely.

P.S: They have even removed individual faculty pages, and clustered all faculty names as a list on their websites.