legal education

Supreme Court Justice SA Bobde, presiding over a bench with Justice L Nageswara Rao, told the Bar Council of India (BCI) today that it should reconsider the undergraduate law degree age limit of 20 years that it had foisted unexpectedly on law aspirants late last year.

The Bar Council of India (BCI) has proposed to override law schools’ autonomy by inducting its own members into their faculty selection committee, as an “expert member”, in its draft first amendment to the Legal Education Rules 2008.

The Bar Council of India (BCI) has doubled the inspection fee for law colleges in India again, for the second time in 2 years.

NUJS Kolkata’s chancellor, the Chief Justice of India (CJI) TS Thakur, has signed off on a resolution to institute a judicial review commission at the university, according to campus sources with knowledge of the development.

The Common Law Admission Test (CLAT) is of no interest to the government, submitted the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) in the Supreme Court yesterday, in response to Shamnad Basheer’s challenge to the conduct of CLAT by national law universities (NLUs).

The Common Law Admission Test (CLAT) core committee decided to bar candidates above the age of 20 years from appearing in the CLAT, 2017 onward, following the Bar Council of India’s (BCI) September 2016 circular to law schools reinstating the age bar for the LLB degree in India.

Prof NR Madhava Menon supported the plan to segregate law courses in India into academic courses and professional courses, and suggested the ways in which to achieve this division and other improvements in the current design of Indian legal education.

GNLU Gandhinagar director Bimal Patel will face a review committee that has been constituted by the Chief Justice of India (CJI) to look into allegations of Patel’s opaque faculty recruitments.

A request by the West Bengal state government saw a last minute addition to today’s agenda of the NUJS Kolkata executive council (EC) meeting that extended the tenure of vice chancellor (VC) Ishwara Bhat by five years. The proposal by the state government would see NUJS having to double its intake of students from 125 to 250 students and to open up two new branches in the state.

The controversial and possibly unconstitutional NUJS Kolkata draft service rules were drafted by a retired judge for Rs 75,000, after two faculty members – associate professor Anirban Mazumdar and assistant professor Ruchira Goswami – failed to make any significant progress for six months on creating new rules, according to authoritative campus sources.

NUJS Kolkata’s illegal interior decoration tender, which caused the university major financial losses and resulted in the dismissal of its registrar after an expensive inquiry into the affair, still exists in its original form and has not been cancelled or renegotiated despite outstanding work.

LLB aspirants’ upper age limit of 20 years for entry to the five year LLB program and 30 years for the three year LLB is back as per the Bar Council of India’s (BCI) latest circular sent to law schools and now uploaded on its website, as first reported by Bar and Bench.

The Nalsar Hyderabad student bar council (SBC) has issued an official statement on the alleged campus sexual harassment and assault that was first revealed in an anonymous open letter published on the Facebook page of The Nalsar Community. The post has since gone viral and been picked up by some non-legal media.

Most of the “errant” Maharashtra government law colleges have now been cleared for admissions, by the Bar Council of India (BCI), reported the Hindustan Times confirming Legally India’s report from last week.

In its draft WBNUJS Service Rules 2016, NUJS Kolkata has been seeking to restrict its faculty and staff from certain kinds of marriage, trade and business, association, engagement with the press and access to courts.

GNLU Gandhinagar has cleared the exam applications of two detained students yesterday, minutes after Legally India reported that the students were in detention limbo due to administrative inaction for weeks.

NUJS Kolkata made NLU history when it suspended, for alleged corruption, an officer of the university – the registrar Surajit Mukhopadhyay. A full inquiry report detailing how Mukhopadhyay was involved in alleged illegal award of contracts related to university infrastructure, has been released. The students of the law school led the initiative, the report duly notes.

At GNLU Gandhinagar, two students stand to lose a year due to alleged administrative inaction following a retroactive rule change. The students have been detained in the third year of BALLB for the second consecutive year in August 2016, despite the existence of a university regulation enabling them to potentially be promoted this year.£££para£££

The Bar Council of India (BCI) and Maharashtra State Bar Council has cleared GLC Mumbai and all the other Maharashtra government and aided colleges that were under embargo against taking admissions. As per the minutes of Saturday, 3 September’s BCI meeting the colleges can take admissions for the academic year 2016-2017.

The Calcutta high court on 26 July dismissed the second appeal of NUJS Kolkata registrar Surajit Mukhopadhyay against his suspension from the post by the vice-chancellor (VC), clearing the way for his dismissal by the university.