We want LI to be one of the friendliest places on the internet, where lawyers and law students help each other with their career related queries and occasionally discuss other stuff that might affect their lives too. In other words:
1. Be kind, respectful and helpful to each other.
2. Be bona fide, truthful, genuine and curious.
3. Assume the best intention of others.
Therefore, in using the site, you must agree to do your best to uphold these community guidelines.
Note that what you find here is written and moderated by anonymous people on the internet.
Therefore everything you read here is very likely unverified, rumour, speculation and/or downright false.
In continuing to read anything here, you must therefore agree not to take anything you read here as factual and that you will exercise due caution, diligence and common sense before acting on any information you may come across here.
You also agree to report any inaccurate or malicious comments with the buttons. Moderators take action within 24 hours, as required and appropriate under law.
Our full terms and conditions apply too.
Do you solemnly agree to all of the above?
https://topscinet.com/scientist_profile/Chimni,%20Bhupinder%20S./1986/?stype=single_year
Prof Chimni's writings are actually pretty old. But I think the reason he is "trending" now and being cited a lot is because TWAIL perspectives are getting more attention, in the age of Trump, BRICS, Israel-Palestine etc. So irrespective of whether he is active nowadays or not, he deserves applause from all of us! 👏👏👏
P.S. Will be good if the moderator can mark this topic in blue -- a fantastic achievement by an academic based in India, rather than abroad.
P.S. 2 Also a sad commentary on the decline in the quality of NUJS VCs since the TMC govt took over. Menon, Chimni and MP Singh in the Left Front years, versus Ishwar Bhat, Amit Talukdar and NK Chakrabarti in the TMC years. 😑
Scopus does matter because QS rankings and several internal assessments by universities look at it. Scopus is like Duckworth Lewis in cricket: imperfect but the most feasible objective standard and the most widely followed one.
And this standard confirms that BS Chimni is a star!
Also, you are deliberately misquoting Chimni. His criticism is against American law journals that refused to publish articles by TWAIL scholars in the early years. It was a different time then and things are gradually changing. American academia is becoming more diverse. Also, US law journals are student-edited, which creates this problem. Even many US professors have commented that the editors of Harvard Law review etc do not appreciate articles on non-US legal systems.
One cant take SCOPUS as an indicator of quality. No serious academic does that.SCOPUS Is a measure of activity and reach and not a measure of quality per se. One can continue to find predatory journals in it. One can also find people publishing in journals that has nothing to do with the discipline and all of these are SCOPUS indexed journals.
Prof. Chimni has written and spoken on multiple occasions about the politics of knowledge production and his comments on AJIL are only a sub-set of that wider body of work. everything that he has said applies with full force to SCOPUS too.
the issue is something else - that legal academia in India is generally sub-standard. and in that sea of not even mediocrity, SCOPUS is not too bad a bet when we make assessments. The stupid thing to do is to take that as the only possible measure through which we can adjudge someone's work.
At the end of the day, a good academic judging the scholarly contributions of another academic cannot be replaced by a numerical metric alone.
Chimni is JNU prof not JGLS. Give credit where due. He taught at JNU entire life (International Law department). JGLS is just a post retirement stint.