NLSIU’s first batch graduated in 1993, coinciding with the early years of liberalization of India’s economy. Around that time, a need for corporate lawyers arose to fulfil demands of private players and foreign investors who were forging new deals and awaiting reforms that would end the “licence raj” and open doors for trade and commerce at an accelerated pace.
Moreover, the success of the school’s progressive curriculum and the opportunities it created for young law students through job placements and extra-curricular activities encouraged policymakers in other states in India to follow suit and begin paying more attention to legal education and feed the demand for young law graduates in multinational and corporate entities, besides traditional legal practice in courts.
“NLSIU brought in a new dimension to education in India. Our five-year BA LLB programme made students take legal education seriously. Before our students were recruited, corporates and multinational corporations thought law students were unemployable,” says vice-chancellor A. Jayagovind. He believes the high standards set by the NLSIU have provided an impetus to the improvement of legal education in India with states setting up law schools modeled on NLSIU and law colleges attached to state universities too emulating the NLSIU curriculum in an effort to improve.
“Chandrababu Naidu, former chief minister of Andhra Pradesh, supported setting up a similar law school in Hyderabad with an aim to make it the best in the country, ” he explains talking about Nalsar University of Law in Hyderabad.
Fine print: Students read newspapers and other journals at NLSIU campus in Bangalore. Photograph: Hemant Mishra / Mint
Since 1993, the school has produced students who have excelled in India and abroad while working with law firms — corporate law and litigation in courts, international organizations, non-profit groups and in civil services.
A board outside the vice-chancellor’s office displays the names of alumni who were awarded for their excellence. Vikram Raghavan, gold medallist of the batch of 1997, now works as legal counsel for the World Bank dispensing legal and transactional advice on a variety of constitutional operational, and local law issues that arise in World Bank-financed projects in West Asia, north Africa and South Asia. Nandan Nelivigi, Raghavan’s senior by four years and a graduate of the first NLSIU batch, is now partner at American law firm White and Case Llp.’s New York office and advises on cross-border transactions in India.
Sitting on a stone bench in the 23-acre NLSIU abound with gulmohar and eucalyptus trees, fifth-year student and president of NLSIU’s student body Visakh Abraham is sending frenzied text messages to his friends who are sprucing up their campus for “University Night” — an annual event before summer vacation begins where all the student committees that are involved in extra-curricular activities give out prizes and souvenirs.