Due to repeated and popular requests, Legally India is conducting research on the quality of Indian law schools’ faculty.
But first, we have to know what to look for.
So, to begin the initiative, we would like to ask students and teachers of various Indian law schools, what they think makes a good law teacher. Consider it a brain storming session before we get started properly.
Please leave comments below to let us know your thoughts. Please keep it clean and don’t name names that could get us in trouble.
As food for thought, here are a few thoughts to get you started.
As a law student, are you satisfied with your classroom experience? Why or why not? Is your faculty not qualified enough? Do they not have enough experience? Can’t you understand them? Do they not care? Or are there some other factors resulting your discontent?
In how many papers of your current curriculum do you rely on self-study, instead of classroom discussion?
If there was no attendance requirement, how many of your classes would you attend?
During your corporate or litigation internship did you find the theoretical instruction received in college very useful, useful, somewhat useful, marginally useful or not at all useful?
Which one is a recurring pet peeve at your law school when it comes to faculty?
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In my own experience, I have found that teachers who are able to impart practical knowledge (apart from the require theoretical aspects) make the best teachers. Professors who did a serious amount of document review exercises with us, such as drafting, reviewing agreements/contracts etc. not only helped us understand things better, but also ensured that we weren't unprepared when it came to internships.
1. Knowledge of the subject: Good-quality practical experience and education from good law schools often leads to this. As does research of high-quality, whose evidence is usually publication in good journals. Very often, faculty members we complain about are from unknown law schools, have no practical experience, and have a poor research record. I am not saying that this is always the case, but all too often.
2. Communication: Most teachers in India are unable to communicate well. They cannot explain concepts clearly. Most also have a weak command over the English language, which is a big problem.
3 . Connecting with students: Another problem is that the students in law schools are from big cities and cosmopolitan families, whereas professors are often from conservative backgrounds. Sometimes professors become hostile and resent the students instead of trying to connect with them. Shortsgate is an example.
Best wishes,
Prachi
I am not at all satisfied with the classroom experience. To begin with, we don't have proper faculty of law and other basic legal subjects, in terms of both quantity and quality. Sometimes there are no faculty at all for a subject. We do not have debates in classes wherein we can diacuss what we are taught. The classes are like dictation. Only a couple of veteran professors focus on the concept and depth of the subject.
It makes no sense to have professors who just throw around big words that end up intimidating students instead of building students' interests in law.
It doesn't help when the students have just entered law school and are not even sure of if they really want to be there and the faculty tells them "I'm sorry, law is a dry subject. There's nothing you can do about it"
Best wishes,
Prachi
You must ask theses questions:
1) What do they think of these comments by our former PM ?
epaper.timesofindia.com/Repository/getFiles.asp?Style=OliveXLib:LowLevelEntityToPrint_TOINEW&Type=text/html&Locale=english-skin-custom&Path=TOIBG/2010/05/02&ID=Ar00801
2) How is it that the best of Harvard and Yale end up in the teaching profession, but NLUs have such few alumni teaching? Is it to do with money, or the corruption and cronyism by VCs?
I'm about to graduate from a 3-year LL.B. Over the last six semesters, barring maybe like 5 teachers who were excellent, all others exhibited decidedly poor standards of teaching, mainly because of the following problems:
1) They are not making students ask enough questions
Teaching anything requires facing the students with the various questions, dilemmas and grey areas involved in that thing. This is much more true for teaching law, where everything from a law being 'right', to the various problems the way a provision is drafted leads to, to different ways of interpreting it, the reasoning used by judges in judgments, etc. - ALL sorts of things need to be questioned and thought about.
Most of the faculty at my college neither seemed interested enough in the subject they taught to be asking too many questions themselves, and certainly did not encourage students to think and research about things that are grey areas and moral/legal dilemmas (say, the role of the law in temple entry for women).
This includes the oft-heard point about no debates or extensive classroom discussions. Most classes I attended in my 3 years were dry monologues delivered by an unexcited teacher, with occasional contributions or doubts from 2 or 3 students.
2) Different requirements for different kind of subjects
Subjects like civil and criminal procedure, limitation law, drafting/pleading/conveyancing, and even minor acts such as court fees etc. definitely benefit more when being taught to young unaware students, if they are being taught by practicing advocates, or people who have practiced at some point in the past. The level of detail they would bring, and the way they could emphasize on the significance of procedure etc. can never be done by young teachers only recently out of law school themselves who have hardly seen the inside of a courtroom (which is what we mostly got).
Similarly, subjects such as jurisprudence and maybe even constitutional and administrative law require a teacher with VERY strong philosophical grounding of the subject. Someone who cares about how the principles explored in these subjects are the bedrock of all law, and is well-read on them too. Instead, we got people who would fulfill bare minimum responsibilities by basically just rushing through the key words and phrases of a thinker/jurist's school of thought, or rushing through key holdings of a consti law judgment without ever discussing its fallout or underlying philosophical grounding, if any.
Commercial and corporate law subjects too could benefit so much more from people who have an idea of how the market pertaining to a certain area of law actually operates.
3) They had no regard for using current context, and academic approaches
Almost never in class would we hear a teacher excitedly/enthusiastically telling us about the most current struggles/developments pertaining to a topic they had just taught. What people read daily in the newspapers or on their News Feed matters a lot since if that is clubbed with classroom discussion on what you're being taught, one is MUCH more interested and attentive.
Similarly, and very problematically, literally no teacher ever (even the good ones) ever encouraged students to read journals or other works by legal academia and jurists. Or even to read the teachers' own works pertaining to the subject they were teaching.
Most, if not all, of them were blissfully unaware even of the active blogging and conference/talk scene in the legal community that cares both about current context and academic grounding.
4) Communication skills
While the spoken English of many teachers pretty much sucked, I have always been able to overlook this flaw if the teacher had a great grip on their subject which they could use to otherwise communicate their ideas somehow.
The more worrying thing was that often the teachers would sheepishly refuse to engage with certain questions aired by students that were counter-intuitive to 'common sense' or questioned some very basic assumptions. Conservative backgrounds could be one reason, as commented above by someone else. Another could simply be not having asked enough such questions themselves.
All of this would often reflect on what students even otherwise suspected to be average qualifications of some teachers (some, not many, certainly not all). So would the conduct of a handful of teachers who would often come really late to deliver a scheduled lecture and leave really early, or cancel a lot of classes.
So that was pretty much my faculty experience at my college. I'll conclude by answering a few of the other questions LI has asked us to send in answers to.
- "In how many papers of your current curriculum do you rely on self-study, instead of classroom discussion?"
28/30 over 6 semesters.
- "If there was no attendance requirement, how many of your classes would you attend?"
One or two out of five, per semester.
- "During your corporate or litigation internship did you find the theoretical instruction received in college very useful, useful, somewhat useful, marginally useful or not at all useful?"
Somewhere between 'not at all useful' to occasionally 'somewhat useful'.
I don’t think any student is satisfied with their classroom experience because many of us have a “fairytale notion” of awesome professors, which is based on stories we read about professors at Ivy league institutions. However, I believe there are a few amazing professors at every institution which makes the experience worthwhile.
Typically, there are half a dozen excellent faculty members, half a dozen decent faculty members, and a dozen horrible faculty members even in the top colleges (when it comes to horrible faculty members, students just follow the curriculum, bunk classes (if possible), and try to figure out what questions the faculty is likely to ask). However, some colleges apparently have zero good faculty, although this assertion is moot because the students themselves somehow feel terribly disillusioned by the overall situation and paint all faculty with the same brush. I personally feel that one or two good/decent faculty can make a tremendous difference if a student follows the approach advocated by such faculty in other papers. Of course, it would be nicer and easier if all faculty were good (again, fairytale!).
KEY PROBLEMS WITH FACULTY:
- Lack of basic knowledge
- Lack of general basic competence (be it communication, evaluation, accountability, etc.)
- Lack of interest in excelling and inspiring
- Inability to facilitate discussion / answer questions
- Inability to maintain discipline
WHAT GOOD FACULTY MEMBERS TYPICALLY DO:
- Displays good (if not awesome) understanding of the subject
- Pushes students to read leading cases and top commentaries
- Encourages and facilitates classroom discussions
- Ensures discipline
- Evaluates strictly and gives feedback
- Does not allow anything to be sham (whether attendance, or viva, or anything else)
- INSPIRES
IF THERE IS NO ATTENDANCE REQUIREMENT, many students will not attend classes. Some would do so because they lack discipline anyway. Others would bunk because they have a moot to prepare for or a project of publishable quality to make.
DURING INTERNSHIPS, the basic understanding of law is notionally helpful (at least in litigation), but we do not have industry facing professors so one typically cannot use the theoretical instruction received during internships (exception being regulatory law courses involving FEMA, RBI and SEBI Regs., etc. which may be useful since the intern has some idea about where to start/look). The practice of corporate transactional law involves 30% law and 70% drafting/ diligence/ commercials/ industry-practices, which cannot be taught in lawschool. In any event, interns typically don’t do more than research (at best, diligence), so theoretical knowledge is rarely handy except in litigation. However, if an intern doesn’t know basic law, it will show, and it will cost them since they won't be able to make the most of the internship. A lot of research questions requires the intern to be proactive and generally good at research (e.g. find the licence requirements for setting up a particular factory), so mooting and high standards of project evaluation can help in ensuring that students learn to research well. To elucidate further, an intern can use theoretical knowledge to make a note on damages for breach of contract or the procedure for liquidation of a company, but theoretical knowledge will not help in computing the damages typically awarded in a certain type of cases at a certain forum. So research skills are essential and a college must impart that. Advanced research questions like taxability of a non-resident in a certain kind of transaction, or whether price fixed pursuant to a a power purchase agreement can be renegotiated, or whether a certain representation provides enough “comfort” to bankers are not things that a lawschool can teach. In a nutshell, theoretical knowledge may not help an intern (except in litigation) but research skills do, although theoretical knowledge ensures that the intern at least grasps the question or its significance.
THE FURTURE: Unless colleges involve practising lawyers in their faculty nothing will change. Since senior lawyers can at best do a lecture or two per semester, it is important to attract younger lawyers to teach as visiting faculty. However, one good development is that some recent graduates from top lawschools with foreign LLMs are now choosing a career in teaching. Unfortunately, not all of them have practicing experience, which means that they can impart theoretical knowledge but not practical knowledge. Having said that, it will suffice if faculty members manage to impart theoretical knowledge, given that practical knowledge is supposed to be acquired during the course of practice. THE MOST IMPORTANT thing remains competition among students, opportunities to participate in competitive events, and research skills.
Most students who manage an elusive training contract are hard workers who make the most of lawschool by being supremely competitive and learning application of law and research. Such efforts have a directly proportional impact on their analytical and cognitive ability, which is the most important aspect that requires development.
Hope this long and not-so-well-structured rant is useful. Cheers!
1. NLUD
2. NALSAR
3. NLSIU
4. NUJS
5. NLUJ
Note: Jindal excluded as it's private.
1. Engaging Classrooms.
A professor may have a lot of experience, he might be brilliant but if he can't motivate the students to be engaging and if the students are sleeping in his class then there goes the advantage of brilliance.
2. Practical Teacher.
The best thing is whether he can impart practical field skills. Makes the class more interesting it does.
3. Class Activities.
One of my International Relations professor here at Nirma, has an amazing method of teaching. There is an student presentation on an latest IR issue every week followed by a brilliant discussion which is a mix of theories and practice. Students understand. They decipher. They apply. Another is the video classrooms, where we upload a video lecture of ourselves in a topic for fellow students.
4. Curriculum.
It plays an important part of how good a teacher is. A curriculum can make a teacher interesting. Should be up-to-date. Include case studies, and practical problems that suits the practical needs of the profession.
5. Connecting the dots.
I appreciate any professor who can connect what I learn in his classroom to how I use it with what I learn in another's.
6. Learning how to learn.
The most important part. Lectures we might forget, skill though stays for lifetime. Classroom lecture should impart the basic knowledge true. But the most important tool the professor can provide his students is cracks and shortcuts to gather expertise on the subject.
This are just some brief things. I believe if all this things are present in a classroom. Then barriers like language is not hard to surpass and most definitely not important.
Do a proper article for Mint to raise greater awareness. This is a very important issue that must be addressed by the government. We cannot hope to produce world-class universities unless we have good faculty.
The law schools should make sure that one teacher teaches only the subject in which he/she specialises, so that they keep themselves updated in that field of law.
Another problem you should address is the regionalisation of law schools, such as domination by the South India lobby, Maharashtra lobby, Jat lobby etc.
Secondly, communication skills. I would like see a law teacher in whose class, students speak more than the teacher.. Listening carefully is the most important part of communication..
Link (see the anonymous comment at the end):
barandbench.com/good-writing-missing-law-schools-prof-nigam-nuggehalli-azim-premji-university/
This is the biggest scam and I hope you cover it. Just think about it: virtually zero BALLB alumni of NLS, NALSAR etc are teaching at the institutions they came from. Contrast this with Harvard, Yale etc, or even the IITs. How can this be? And to think NLS has the audacity to call itself the "Harvard of the East", when China, Singapore, Japan and Hong Kong are light years ahead. NLS does not even feature n the QS rankings of the top 200 law schools. If any law school can be called the Harvard of the East it is NUS Singapore.
Just think about it: virtually zero BALLB alumni of NLS, NALSAR etc are teaching at the institutions they came from. Contrast this with Harvard, Yale etc, or even the IITs. How can this be?
UNQUOTE
Quite a few graduates of top lawschools, including NLSIU, are teaching at various lawschools after completing LLM from Harvard, Oxford, etc. However, I agree that the situation could be better.
Here is why NLU graduates may not be teaching at NLUs:
- the pay isn't good (even random management schools pay their law faculty better salaries)
- private lawschools like Jindal and Amity value NLU graduates more as faculty (not just in terms of pay but in terms of respect as well)
- assistant professors are engaged on contract basis (which means that they do not even have job security - say against the Dean/VC and you can be sacked)
- VCs recruit their own (either their former students or people from their state/caste/community)
- other professors are insecure and screw the bright faculty (most of the senior professors do not even have any decent publications to their credit and the young professors often feel very insecure)
Ask yourself this: Why will a brilliant chap with great publications and a stellar education want to join a place where recruitment is done arbitrarily, pay and term is contract based, bright alumni/faculty is targeted by existing faculty, etc.???
The only reward is the love of the students and the sense of contribution. But hey, love and feelings do not pay the bills and, in any event, the contract can be terminated with 3 months' notice or pay.
For instance, other than Nalsar VC Faizan Mustafa, we have not got a single response to our questionnaire about law schools.
www.legallyindia.com/law-schools/law-school-profiles-nalsar
We have done a few stories about law school faculty hires or departures and have requested such data several times, but most VCs simply don't want to share that data or want to be transparent about it.
Law firms by contrast, are now comfortable with disclosing promotions, etc, which is why we cover it.
We hope that we can gradually change attitudes on that front...
indiatoday.intoday.in/education/story/foreign-university-campuses-in-india/1/644180.html
Placement ranking:
NLS>NALSAR>NUJS>NLUD
Faculty ranking
NALSAR>NLUD>NUJS>NLS
Infrastructure ranking:
NALSAR>NLUD>NLS>NUJS
Convenience of location ranking:
NUJS>NLUD>NLS>NALSAR
VC ranking:
NLUD>NALSAR>NUJS>NLS
Moot court ranking:
NLS>NALSAR>NLUD>NUJS
You must be from NLUD! I am not interested in mud-slinging, but making an "objective" comment.
The law cannot be taught through just books and bare acts, and the emphasis on memorising answers needs to be diluted. Memory is a key factor of being a successful lawyer and must be honed through law school, but at the same time, the focus needs to be on clearing concepts. Simple concepts like contracts of adhesion, damages, compensation etc. are not 'taught' but merely recited. Case studies, mock trials/suits should be focused on. This is a way of imparting actual practical legal education. Expecting a law student to memorise the arbitration act, without having any understanding of why section 11 is not within the purview of Section 42, is not the aim of a legal education.
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