Aman is a PhD Candidate and Teaching Fellow at UNSW Law & Justice and an Associate Professor of Legal Practice (on leave) at Jindal Global Law School, India. In this post, he plays with themes of “experiments, enculturation and excitement” to reflect on the changing law school landscape in India.
Tell us about how your law school fits in the university landscape in India?
I will wriggle out of the difficult task of situating Jindal Global Law School (JGLS) in the Indian legal education landscape. Partly, owing to the difficulty attached to capturing the immense vastness and variety of legal education in India.
Instead, I will make a more modest, unphilosophical attempt to see JGLS in relation to my own undergraduate legal education at one of the national law universities (NLU) in India between 2007 and 2012 – which is the period when JGLS was established. The contrast I feel can itself be a propaedeutic exercise. NLUs in India, though hard to generalise, are a (very) small class of “elite” public law schools in India. However, their ‘public’ and ‘national’ character needs some clarity. The NLUs are basically law schools that are given the status of autonomous universities and are statutory creations of the federal state where they are housed (unlike, say, the prestigious engineering schools like the Indian Institutes of Technology, which are central/union government institutions).
Back in 2007, when I started law school, there were almost 11 NLUs (along with a few private schools) that were offering a five-year integrated degree in law (usually with humanities or business administration). While there were conversations envisioning national law schools in the 1970s (for instance, see Rahmatullah Khan here, or hear Upendra Baxi here), the design for such an integrated, five-year program (after high school) began to take a more concrete shape in the 1980s. N.R. Madhava Menon, who took charge of this experiment, saw this as a part of the “second generation” legal education reforms in India. This inception was also shaped by the growing influence of/interaction with American legal academia and philanthropy (see here and here). In fact, there was much chatter about the creation of “Harvard of the East” with the establishment of the first school in Bangalore in 1986.
The idea was to create centres of “excellence” amidst growing conversations and concerns (see here & here) attached to the lack of rigour, resources and limited approaches in the teaching/learning of law (especially the doctrinal emphasis). The attempt, therefore, was to move towards a better quality and a more “socially relevant legal education.” It is hard to give an easy account of the extent to which such an “excellence” was attained. However, owing to a lack of financial support and structures attached to overcoming social challenges of accessibility and inclusion (for instance, see here), the national law schools failed to be centres of “equity” – another early aspiration of the project.
The NLU project grew rapidly through India’s liberalisation in 1990s. The expensive legal education it offered tried to meet the “changing demands of the legal market” (also see here). In the next two decades, a “phalanx” of NLUs (Marc Galanter, here) were established following the footsteps of the first one in Bangalore. However, these changes came with rising challenges to hire and sustain good faculty. Many continued to face some of the challenges they were explicitly designed to overcome.
Amidst such pressures on law schools in 2009, while I was in NLU Jodhpur (among the first five NLUs that were established in 1999), JGLS was established as a part of an elite private non-profit University (Jindal Global University, JGU) funded by a philanthropist, Naveen Jindal (a prominent industrialist attached to one of the biggest steel and energy companies in India and a politician). This was also the time when India saw a rise in private state-of-the-art universities (to name a few contemporaneous ones, Ashoka University, Shiv Nadar University, Azim Premji University) established through the endowments of many prominent industrialists aiming to create “world class universities” promoting “global excellence”.
These philanthropic initiatives also emerged in the immediate aftermath of anti-affirmative action protests that India witnessed in 2006. The protests were against the Government’s plan to reserve an additional 27 per cent of seats in Central Educational Institutes ( “CEIs” established, maintained or aided by the Central/Union Government) for the state-recognised “Other Backward Classes,” a move that was also upheld by the Supreme Court of India in 2008. The hidebound argument against such reservation was often voiced in the language of preserving “merit” and “excellence” in educational institutions, and directed at the sanctioned decrease in the general (non-reserved) pool of seats from 77.5% to 50.5% in the CEIs.
In 2009, JGU entered the law school ‘market’ as a university offering professional courses in non-STEM fields, with the law school as its first and flagship school under the leadership of the founding (and current) Vice Chancellor – C. Raj Kumar (an internationally trained lawyer, and also the founding and current Dean of JGLS). In fact, JGLS continues to be the biggest and possibly one of the most recognised schools of the University. As a law school, JGLS came with a renewed promise of creating an institution of “global excellence.” While sharing similar aspirations and patterns as the NLUs, this “experiment” in ‘global’ legal education attempted to remedy the problems an NLU, such as Jodhpur, for example, was facing at that time (rather acutely): such as hiring/retaining good and motivated faculty; advancing research; promoting a critical, interdisciplinary legal education; and international collaborations and visibility/recognition. Such an attempt came with costs – often borne by student fees (which are three to five times the fee of the NLUs). With time, JGLS has grown in size, programs, ambition – and even visibility. It is, however, open for conversation as to how much change it brought when assessed against the intervention it sought.
Why did you decide to become an academic?
The answer is, of course, with the benefit of the hindsight. However, for as long as I can remember, I have harboured a desire to teach. This continues to be the primary attraction for me. I guess the desire was shaped by the enthusiasm and aspiration my parents attached to my education, and their efforts (and even sacrifices) in the exposures they facilitated quite early in my life. While there had been a shifting imagination of the venue (school or university), by the time I was in law school, the possibility of teaching at law school seemed exciting. Finding some inspiration and resonance in the distant stories of some of the earlier crops of the NLU experiment who ventured into academia (and having been taught by one), it also started to look possible. Though I did not have many examples in my vicinity at NLU Jodhpur, passing through the NLU experiment did make the option of “not being a lawyer” (even an academic) imaginable. It goes without saying that at this stage, the attraction was with very little idea of what it actually meant to be at a university, and with less concrete examples of the responsibilities of the office.
With some attempts (and failures) to re-enter the University, I finally came to a full-time academic role at JGLS in 2020 after working for seven years, primarily at a law firm and some human rights spaces. This move by 2020 was deliberate – possibly, less naive. One, I had a growing sense of caution attached to the ‘impactful’ work I had been doing until then – almost like the sense of driving with my foot on the accelerators. I was increasingly seeing the need to apply the “brakes” (borrowing from Apoorvanand here) – to slow down, and to be reflective (and reflexive) of such impact, the work, and its tools involved (the law itself).
The university, despite being prey to several captures of insidious powers, still seemed like a place where such slowing down was possible, and offered to be a venue where asking (and living with) more difficult (and often mis-termed ‘impractical’) questions seemed conceivable. By then, I also had a slightly better orientation to reflect on the role and responsibilities around the teaching of law – being witness to (and learning from) more concrete examples of people entering academia and seeing some spaces opening as possible venues for such teaching. Of course, the spaces that were “opening up” were often limited to the NLUs and the Jindals (and examples of the people who were visible were often those who, like me, had moved through these systems). Despite the caution and the vigilance that I hope such an unquiet realisation generated (and hopefully generates), teaching itself started to increasingly appear as a form of practice of law, with its own political and ethical stakes. Over the last few years, I have attempted to explore some of these “stakes” here, here and here.
What excites you about your job?
Continuing the mischief attached to the first (mis)answer, I will use this question as an opportunity to reflect a little more about one of the questions that came from the audience during the panel about the falling standards of academic freedom in India, and how do I see myself adapting to such a context.
Of course, it is not the ‘falling’ standards of academic freedom, or my adaptation that I see as ‘exciting’! I see ‘excitement’ in these times as possibilities that push against the ‘doom’ that is often associated with the construction and measurement of the intensity of such a ‘fall’ of academic freedom. To me, such assessment of ‘doom’, based on the audience, is influenced by how we conceptualise academic freedom; how we tend to exceptionalise it as being unique to contexts like India (especially in a time when western universities, even in Australia, have called the police onto their campus to stymie protests against the genocide in Gaza); or see it ahistorically (basically, ignoring histories and varying intensities attached to such falling of freedom even within India as several authors here caution against).
I must also clarify that this ‘excitement’ attached to possibilities is not a delusional denial of the terrible state of affairs back home (for instance, see here) – but is the sense of a measured hope. The hope is perhaps in knowing that the challenges to academic freedom have presented itself to many before me (and around me) – in varying degrees, of course. It is indeed instructive to see how they have operated (and/or continue to do so) with constraints and in troubled times and learn from their navigations/techniques to carry on teaching and discharging their roles.
Upendra Baxi (here) sees hope in these “rebellious pedagogies” (and even “histories of legal learning”). He, in fact, reminds us how we must “enculture” legal education “outside the ways of a historically sensible and sensitive grasp of that which already precedes us when we begin to think of the present moment.” I feel that demand, with some modifications, also applies to reading contemporaneous practices that accompany us. In fact, there are existing attempts towards creations of such archives (for instance, listen to Rohini Sen, here). The efforts (old and new) and the provocations do give me some cause for excitement!
Image: Taken at the first intercultural legal dialogue panel held at UNSW Law & Justice on 12 March 2025.