Biggest tragedy of NLS Bangalore is when it becomes a day boarding college and students stay outside campus and come to attend classes for few hours and leave.

This is not what Professor Menon envisioned nor expected from India’s first and most prestigious NLU. Ask any NLS alumni and their memories and learning must be their memories of campus when they lived, ate and played together and also studied.

The residential university’s character is lost when you fail to build enough housing for students and admit them for money and ask them to stay with their parents or in exploitative PG accommodations.

Don’t reduce NLS to a local degree college of Bangalore University.

Dont turn NLS into the boarding school of your dreams. Universities are professional spaces. Not just spaces for you to live, laugh, and love. Why should the university be residential? What real value does it add?

Do you think all of Harvard's law students stay in the same hostels/dorms? No. Most law students take up various kinds of housing options and many stay outside campus and travel. Do you think everyone who goes to Oxford for law stays in the same packed hostels? Some may stay in the colleges but many more people—often the most interesting people—stay outside with people they actually enjoy. Does this mean that Harvard alumni or Oxford alumni are unable to network or form bonds with each other? Of course not.

There are costs to increasing seats at NLS. And increasing seats at NLS is a good thing. We need more, not fewer, people to access quality legal education. There will obviously be growing pains and they will have to take in more fees to build more hostels. But I'm honestly a little tired of this whinging and clinging to the past.

If NLS had to remain the elite institution it once was, it should never have started the CLAT- they should have just accepted sons and daughters of important people in admissions and been done with it. But no one can seriously argue that a merit based admissions process was not a good thing or that increasing access to education wasnt a good thing. Thats what increasing seats does. That is what this whole thing is about. IITs have thousands of students- that expansion was a good thing. It means more and not less opportunity. Folks who want to stop that kind of expansion always assume theyll be on the in group. Never realising that if the university is made elite enough- if their arguments are taken to the logical conclusion- theyll actually be left out.

IITs also have enough infrastructure. I don't think anyone minds batch expansion per se – it's the fact that we don't have enough faculty (senior batches are being put into larger classrooms i.e. we go from 4 sections of 60 to 3 of 80 and so on), not enough quality faculty (anyone taking classes in the Batch of '28 can confirm), not enough hostel rooms, bunk beds in tiny cramped rooms, not enough classrooms on campus, and more.

All of this isn't to say that NLS isn't great – it still is. On an average, still amazing. Doesn't mean it can't be criticised.

Also, Harvard is a terrible example. While it is very possible to form bonds without being in a residential space, it is equally true that being put into a common living space puts you in a situation to have unexpected encounters, random late-night conversations, closer bonds with friends, doing fuckall together at 2 am. You can't seriously say "some students in Harvard live off-campus doing the law" without acknowledging that: (a) Students doing the law are literal adults in the USA, NOT doing an undergrad and (b) US undergrad is on an average known in popular media, culture, and actual reality to be very focused on college life – a big part of which comes from shared accommodation.

Thanks!

Yes, with the new non-residential 3-year BA programme to start this year, NLS is barrelling towards becoming a regular degree college. It is hard to believe that the admin is actually giving greater preference to the 3-year BA and the 3-year LLB programmes. The primary premise for the very establishment of NLS was the 5-year integrated BA-LLB - today, that premise lies in tatters.

currently NLSIU is cramming 3 people + addl. furniture into a room meant for 2....not to mention that the rest of the campus infra is already pretty strained....so its better to attend as a day scholar and live outside....moreover they cannot force adults to stay in the hostel especially if they are from Bangalore thats just plain crazyy