EMERGENCE OF NATIONAL LAW UNIVERSITIES AND LEGAL EDUCATION IN INDIA: LEARNING THROUGH EXPERIMENTS (original) (raw)

2019, Contemporary Law Review

Prof. (Dr.) N.R. Madhava Menon, the father of modern Indian legal education, during his lifetime, has inspired countless lawyers and law teachers. His experiment of establishing National Law School of India University, Bangalore stimulated various state governments to establish NLU in their respective states and establishing National Judicial Academy, Bhopal giving professional training to judicial functionaries. The author has been fortunate to interact with Prof. Menon on several occasions. The author fondly remembers his first interaction with Prof. Menon in February 1999 at S.D.M. Law College, Mangalore, when the author had said that ‘a successful law teacher must work thirty hours a day’, and asked how is it possible, replying to which Prof. Menon explained how we can work multi-fold at a time to achieve target of thirty hours within twenty-four hours of a day. Since then the author is working tirelessly to contribute to legal education and profession. It’s unfortunate, our academic fraternity has lost Prof. Menon on May 8, 2019 and it’s a difficult task to find an eminent professor like him to carry forward his unfinished agenda on ‘clinical and continuing legal education’ while sacrificing himself for the cause of legal education. The rampant number of CLAT applicants reflects the potentiality of legal profession, as envisioned while creating first NLU and the lawyers graduating from these NLUs have brought considerable reform to legal profession. However, Bar, Bench and Academia linkage needs to be strengthened further requiring timely introspection about quality teaching and research. This paper attempts to chronicle the emergence of NLUs, as modern Gurukuls of law, starting in 1988 under the dynamic leadership of Prof. Menon and to explore the transformation of legal education and profession into preferred destination in contemporary world from being an ignored profession in the past.