Practice Made Perfect

The NLSIU model, pioneered by legal legend Prof. Madhav Menon, gives its students a higher degree of legal proficiency.

- Shamnad Basheer

There’s something to be said for the long, laborious hours of law firms. Slave labour, some may call it, but one advantage is that it helps you bond strongly with others in the same boat—those toiling away into the wee hours of the morning. And so it was with me and Ameet Datta, a dear friend. Incidentally, we interviewed for our jobs (at Anand and Anand, the country’s leading intellectual property firm) on the very same day and, thereafter, spent many a late night learning about the law and life.

Ameet went on to become a leading IP lawyer. But I digress. This article is meant to celebrate a new model of legal education that late Prof. Madhav Menon, who passed away some weeks ago, birthed via the National Law School of India University (NLSIU) in Bengaluru. That model has since been replicated several times across the country—last I counted, the number had reached 25.

Some years ago, while visiting Ameet, I met his daughter Tara. She was busy practising English and Maths on worksheets. I later learned from his wife, Monica, who also happens to be one of India’s leading entertainment law attorneys, that it was part of a Japanese pedagogical technique called ‘Kumon’, where students learn through sheer repetition and practice.

I was stumped. This is what Prof. Menon had unwittingly pioneered at NLSIU, where the academic curriculum was designed to keep students on their toes throughout, rather than cram case law towards the end of each semester, right before the exams. He knew that this had to change if the pursuit of law was to be ever taken seriously and the subject put on par with engineering and medicine, the most coveted professional study courses in the 1980s.