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A post doc is by definition done after a phd - Gauri taught for a year or so but that’s not a terribly new trajectory- people want to explore and see how different jobs suit them and application cycles don’t always align- idk why this is being seen as some failure when it’s obviously not.
Would you think someone doing an llm a couple of years after working is inferior to someone who did it right out of undergrad? Thats silly ! Are you still in law school ? Maybe you don’t understand how academia works ? Or adult life ?
Academia isn’t more school - it’s research and writing and teaching and peoples career trajectories don’t follow a linear path. Literally no one I know in academia has followed some linear path.
a) As someone above said, postdocs positions are incredibly difficult to get, so some experience post-PhD makes you stand out from other candidates who may have better credentials.
b) A postdoc is perhaps the only time you get paid handsomely to do only research with minimal to no teaching obligations. So, for example, when an Associate Professor applies for a postdoc, it is one the very few options where they are able to focus purely on research for a certain amount of time.
Atreyee Majumdar was not a law postdoc. She had a humanities postdoc (in anthropology). Same with Rinku Lamba. She was not a law postdoc.
Only Gauri Pillai and Arul George Scaria fit what OP was asking for. So even NLS has only 2. Even among those, Gauri Pillai did a PhD, joined teaching and then got a postdoc the subsequent year. Arul George Scaria is the only one who went directly for a postdoc subsequent to his PhD.
2. Arul George Scaria
3. Atreyee Majumdar
4. Kena Wani (sponsored by Max Planck but in India)
5. Rinku Lamba (I think, but I'm not 100 per cent sure if her fellowships were post docs or not)
Gauri Pillai is pursuing Postdoc now.
There are others too whom I'm not sure if their fellowships were postdocs or not.
I think you might mean 5 NLS graduates, no? Is that correct? Where are they doing their postdocs?
Think for yourself: how many research professors do you see even in foreign institutions rather than professors? Maybe 1 or 2.