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I've also heard great things about some of the new professors though. Pranav came back to teach for a while, and I'm sure he would've been a brilliant chap at that. Heard similar things about Aakanksha who was swiftly poached by JGLS. Sudhanshu was definitely a decent professor too, though his specialisation was more in capital markets than company law at large; regardless he's also now at NLS.
Last I heard, there are no great professors currently — most of the corporate-related learnings happen through practitioner-led electives, which thankfully have been increasing steadily. So, if you're a fellow alum & can find the time, this would actually be a great time to take courses: we wouldn't be where we are w/o our professors either now, would we?
1. Teaching- Boring class and just reads from the prescribed materials sequentially. Compare that to Ms. Manisha or the others.
2. Temper- He gets angry for no reason and is always in hatred to the class for no reason with every batch.
3. His Marking standards are incredibly arbitrary and tough. He focuses entirely on rote book words as opposed to application and analysis.
The reason they let jurisprudence go was because “oh Dhanda covers that in legal methods anyway” and I do think there’s some fear about how a more open minded prof - say Sid C would have taught it. Now Sid C is a lefty too- but he’s a debater first so he’ll be able to give you all sides of an argument before trying to convince you.
She buys into critical race theory and even more abstract feminist theory whole sale. While shutting down criticisms of those things - even from black people or feminists. She elides the differences between the argument a mackinnon and a butler makes. And the daylight that’s there between say - WEB Du Bois and Kimberley Crenshaw. She makes these communities seem like a monolith with one argument that you either fall in line or you’re a bigot. But the real thing is that it’s very complex and it’s worth it to teach students that complexity.
What’s more a good teacher should be teaching the complexity to ensure her students can use any of those arguments as might suit them in their work as lawyers and counter any of those arguments as well.
Instead she rewards students who have the “right opinion” even if fuzzy thinking gets them there. She doesn’t trust that her students will get to the same conclusions as her if she simply provides them with the fair introduction to all of these arguments so she strawmans the opposing positions. It makes for worse - more indoctrinated and less useful left wing students too.
Even moving away from that - I liked her poverty outline enough as her student but it’s clear now that there’s a real blind spot. We should be knowing what free market economists are really arguing, not the straw man positions we wish they’d argue but what they’re actually saying. We should be able to examine in some greater depth how caste affects law and poverty in India. We should be learning about labour movements that tried to change things. It’s not enough to just cry “capabilities approach” without seriously engaging with all the scholarly work that is out there. When we do learn intersectionality- we should be asking ourselves difficult questions on what that means when it’s race and class, or caste and class, or gender and caste.
Dhanda wants her students to come away thinking there is an easy answer to these questions and that good liberal feminist people have one way of thinking about this - but they don’t. There are wide disagreements even in the left wing academia about how these conflicts come down. And we elide that more interesting scholarship because we want to think there is some broad alliance building based on … vibes ?
The problem with her teaching is not that it’s Left wing. It’s that its just not sufficiently rigorous. It’s the junk food Mickey Mouse version of left wing that does a disservice to its students too.
I have no problems with a teacher talking about their opinions - that’s her right. my problem is with the dogmatic behaviour in and out of the classroom.
Sourabh Bharati - Administrative Law
There are a few new enrolments which I would like to name -Balu Sunilraj - Political Science for first years and he is really well read in theoretical and his SSS for populism is doing really well too.
Rohan Cherian Thomas - he has really good knowledge of IPR.
Srijan Mandal - very well read in history
TS Kannan - very very good for sociology, knows his stuff and allocates time for doubt in every class
tbh there is faculty exodus and the VC has not appointed good faculty in masses. A better VC would be able to manage that, but this can be easily resolved if his tenure is not renewed and some other candidate is brought.
Vasanthi knows constitutional law- she actually really knows it well, even if she penalises opinions she disagrees with. She did a good job for me but not everyone shared that opinion.
Pathakji makes tax law fun. That’s about it.