Around this time last year, there were several posts bemoaning (and a few celebrating) the fact that Sidharth Chauhan was leaving NALSAR Hyderabad to re-join his alma mater, NLSIU Bengaluru. Some people were even describing it as 'one of the most consequential transfers in NLU history' and drawing analogies with comeback stories in literary works. I suppose it might be a good thing that he has moved to an institution where the attention is on many other better known faculty members and he can quietly recede into the background. I remember meeting him in the mid-2000s when he was quite central to the expansion of competitive debating in Indian Universities. I would like to hear from current NLSIU students.

he's just chilling. having a good time and living a peaceful life. apparently happier we the higher faculty quality and research interactions, but idk how true that is. sweet fellow, offered his office for therapy sessions (online therapy) due to a shortage of rooms on campus (exams, construction etc.)

what did he do for debating?

OP here. Let me answer the 'what did he do for debating?' query. I attended one of the other colleges in Bangalore and was a regular participant in the NLS Debate during my student days. I remember Sid.C being the Tournament Director in 2005 and being part of the adjudication core in 2006 and 2007. He personally convinced people from many Indian colleges to start their foray into parliamentary-style debating around that time. Alumni from NUJS, NALSAR, Christ Law, IIT Bombay and several DU colleges have told me that he helped in developing the activity at their institutions, either by judging internal selections or helping them in organising the early editions of their tournaments. I last met him in 2012 when he had just started teaching at NLSIU and was very much helping the students interested in this activity. I lost touch with him after he moved to NALSAR and just recently found out that he is back at NLSIU. Good to know that some current students have positive things to say about him.

He taught the 'Comparative Public Law and Governance' course for our batch in the November 2024-January 2025 Trimester. Since we were a large class of 116 students, he largely lectured through the sessions. However, he did explain the seemingly complex readings in a manner that was easy to follow. He also respected the wide diversity that exists in the LL.M. batch and did not make condescending remarks about any student. He was easily accessible for discussions outside the class hours and was very patient in answering our questions. Easily one of the best classroom teachers I have had. I can see why students at NALSAR were upset about his departure.

Yes. I was in the same batch. He has made the course plan publicly available on academia.edu. I am copying the link below for the benefit of students at other law schools:

https://www.academia.edu/126119436/Comparative_Public_Law_And_Governance_November_2024_January_2025_NLSIU_Bengaluru

He has uploaded most of his course plans from NALSAR on his academia.edu profile. Here are links for some of them:

Constitutional Law I (Fundamental Rights): https://www.academia.edu/96331395/CONSTITUTIONAL_LAW_I_Syllabus_June_October_2022_NALSAR_Hyderabad

Constitutional Law II (Structures of Governance):

https://www.academia.edu/96331746/CONSTITUTIONAL_LAW_II_Syllabus_January_April_2023_NALSAR_Hyderabad

Political Obligations (Elective):

https://www.academia.edu/96332831/POLITICAL_OBLIGATIONS_January_April_2018_NALSAR_Hyderabad

Judicial Process and Statutory Interpretation (Elective):

https://www.academia.edu/96332992/JUDICIAL_PROCESS_AND_STATUTORY_INTERPRETATION_July_October_2018_NALSAR_Hyderabad

Interdisciplinary Studies On The Indian Legal System (Seminar):

https://www.academia.edu/96337810/INTERDISCIPLINARY_STUDIES_ON_THE_INDIAN_LEGAL_SYSTEM_January_April_2018_NALSAR_Hyderabad

I could not find such uploads from other faculty members at NLSIU, NALSAR and NLU Delhi. I wish that more faculty members from these better known institutions had made their course plans publicly available.

I am a student, based in England, studying human rights law and jurisprudence. Am currently in a hospital emergency department waiting room, waiting for a friend who needed a knee seeing to. Opened this site for fun to take away the monotony and thought all I would get from this would be some next-level shitposting. Opened the link to the 'Political Obligations' course plan. It filled me with such happiness that I let out a heartfelt sort of groan of envy and pure joy. The readings are literally so awesome and that too, this was being taught by somebody who is, by all accounts, a fab teacher. The sound I made was such, though, that a medical orderly looked around to see if I was ill. How to explain that I have just been reading something which makes me wanna dance in the streets.

I have no hesitation in saying that at present, NLSIU is the only Indian Law School which is offering a LL.M. programme that is worth attending. Those who have taken PG CLAT should continue to mark NLSIU at their Number 1 preference, and ignore the nonsense that is being circulated on social media and YouTube. The point of a postgraduate programme is to be challenged at an academic level and to build skills for the future. Yes, there are some practical issues such as the off-campus housing due to the ongoing expansion, but the quality of faculty and the courses are easily the best in the country. In fact those CLAT coaches who are making uninformed remarks about NLSIU should perhaps themselves give the PG CLAT and attend the LL.M. programme at NLSIU. People should come here if they are prepared to work hard and learn new things.

You cannot believe the relief, the utter, unbridled joy, that hearing this common sense, completely correct, reasonable perspective gives me. We have become so emotionally involved in petty law school bickering that common sense has gotten lost somewhere. This is coming from someone who has never been to NLSIU, probably never will go, but I have a good quality foreign LLM under my belt, with partial funding involved. You just have to look at what's coming out of there (like the course plan linked above). Why, oh why, can't more people be clear-eyed like you? From having done a public law LLM which involved legal theory work, too, and which has a justified market reputation for being very challenging and stimulating, I can tell you that if this course plan is representative of what is done at NLSIU, not only can we conclude that 'NLSIU is the only Indian Law School which is offering a LL.M. programme that is worth attending', we must (whether we like it or not) conclude that NLSIU's LLM is getting right the fundamental aspects of the stuff that the globally best universities get right with their LLM programmes. If NLSIU had been doing this stuff when I was looking at LLM programmes, I sure would (and should) have given it a good deal of priority. Congratulations to them and looking forward to the day when, even if it is still mocked for the 'Harvard of the East' nickname, people can acknowledge at least that a 'UCL' or 'LSE of the East' (or maybe so far as 'Oxford of the East') might be appropriate. Obviously, there's still some way to go for that to happen, but they're quite far along that path - further than many people (in India and beyond) think, or would like to believe.

Thank you for acknowledging my comment. If you think that the Comparative Public Law course plan meets international standards, you should also look at what was taught by the likes of Prof. Arul George Scaria (Law and Technology), Prof. Arun Kumar Thiruvengadam (Regulation and Welfare) and Prof. N.S. Nigam (Law and Justice In A Globalizing World). I had joined the LL.M. here after some hesitation because of what I had read online, but the actual experience of going through the coursework has convinced me (and most of my batchmates) that this is the best postgraduate programme in legal studies that is currently available in India. It will be a worthwhile option in the coming years because of the prohibitive costs of attending universities in the Global North.

Definitely. I think NLSIU is well on the way to being that. I believe once seeing a pitch by Sudhir in a speech to a conference of university VCs or something proposing it as such an alternative to the global north in times of COVID-19. I cynically smiled at the time, thinking he was just being opportunistic. But in seeing the actual content of what is being done, I will say that he was right to propose that pitch, and that maybe he should make that pitch a bit more ambitious in the future too!

I think you have enough common sense to realise that you are fortunate enough to have a VC who is (largely) good at his job, an excellent advocate for his uni and someone with genuine ideas for change in his mind. That's supplemented by a number of excellent faculty. Make the best use you can of such people. Oscar Wilde, based on his intellectually formative experiences at Oxford, once said that the idea of a university education was that you'd learn to gracefully play around with ideas. They are teaching you to do that, so that's the most important base (as far as you'd be concerned from a student point of view) covered. Other things will fall in place over time. As for the trimmings, my UK LLM was done not so long ago that I can recall a number of things about it. Even if you leave out the good course material, the language used, a number of the policies, even the jargon, sound, if you remove the name 'NLSIU' from them, very much like what a good UK university has (or should have) in place.

PS: Do excuse my interest. I did an LLM abroad a while ago. However, while my conviction at the time was that all LLM programmes worth spending time on are outside India, my attention has increasingly been drawn to NLSIU's work. That's not least because of the curriculum design of many of the academics you name. And that has caused me to modify my impressions to a certain extent. All the best for your LLM studies.

We recently learnt that he has finally submitted his Ph.D. thesis. The internal presentation happened sometime in June 2025, so he should get his degree later this year. While we were sad to see him go, it appears that the move to NLS has been good for him. At NALSAR, he was teaching more than 3-4 other professors combined for several years. Hope to see him writing and publishing more in the coming years.

According to his academia.edu profile, the title of his Ph.D. thesis is 'Juridical Engagement With Electoral Reservations'. Those who have read the full draft are saying it is one of the best pieces of doctrinal legal research produced by a serving Indian law teacher in decades. The word is that he has had the full draft ready since the first half of 2022 but had a tough supervisor who has made him go through several revisions since then. I hope he sends it to a good publisher and does not waste his efforts as he did earlier with the report on the NLUs (sometime in 2018) and the extensive ghost-writing that he has done for judges and senior academics over the years. It is time for all that effort to bear fruit and for him to catch up with his immediate peers such as Arghya Sengupta, Madhav Khosla, Neha Mishra and Prashant Reddy, all of whom have published extensively over the last decade.

Here is the full text that has been uploaded. Make of it what you will.

https://www.academia.edu/143107803/Juridical_Engagement_With_Electoral_Reservations_In_India

It seems that this link has expired. Seriously, I cannot think of too many people active in academics today who will freely share their thesis for public consumption. Here is the link from SSRN which he had shared on LinkedIn a few days ago:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6163966

I sat for his final viva voce which happened recently. He may have taken a long time to complete his thesis, but judging by the quality of the discussions and the comments by the external examiners, it seems to be a worthwhile effort. The external examiners were among the best names in the country drawn from the fields of political science, sociology and constitutional law. All of them were quite positive that the thesis should be promptly converted into a book. Sid.C, being the selfless fellow that he is, has already shared the full text on his SSRN, Academia and ResearchGate profiles. In the middle of the viva, he actually said that the point of writing the thesis was to benefit practitioners and students. It seems that he is not worried at all about his publication prospects and citation counts. He said that his purpose would be served if his writing feeds into the teaching of courses on Indian Constitutional Law. I must say that it was the first time that I was hearing him in person, and I have not seen anything like it at an Indian Law School. No wonder he is so highly rated by his former students.

I had the opportunity to attend his classes at NALSAR, both in Constitutional Law and one of the electives. He is one of the few professors who has a truly holistic understanding of the subjects he teaches. With his depth of knowledge and clarity of thought, he could easily have been an equity partner at a Tier-1 law firm or on the path to becoming a Senior Adv. But he chose academia because he really is meant to give legal education something in return.

Although our interactions were limited, what stood out to me wasn’t just his teaching (which was excellent), but his kindness as a person. There was an incident, something I would prefer not to detail, but during a hearing, he remembered something about me from two years ago and actively extended his support without even asking for it. That gesture stayed with me. That day, I saw beyond the professor and truly recognised the warmth and empathy he carries as a human being.

Also, he is very enthu, he ran several things in NALSAR from the front and back-end, which he should in NLS as well, but ofc, for next 2-3 years he should focus on completing his phD, publications and his research output which is lacking as of now as he did not do that for a long time, AND IT IS FINE.