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Giving Month@NLSIU - Focus Track: Research & Teaching

Campaign by National Law School of India University

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Giving Month is NLSIU’s annual initiative to invite alumni support in jointly achieving the University’s development goals. Read more about Giving Month on NLSIU’s website (nls.ac.in).

Research and Teaching

NLSIU today places a renewed focus on developing its research and teaching capacity. Research and teaching are core to a University’s function and contributions to society, and play a critical role in fostering curiosity and critical thinking in students.

The University has identified research priorities critical to solving key challenges for the 21st century in areas such as climate change; law, technology and society; and legal system reform. NLSIU is in the process of recruiting Academic Fellows, early career graduates (law and non-law) to assist faculty and researchers across research projects. 

Organising the University’s existing research output is as critical as producing new work. The University is building a Digital Commons to support and manage NLSIU’s research and publication repository, revitalising its journals and streamlining editorial and review processes. NLSIU is committed to achieving and sustaining internationally peer-recognised scholarly output.

Faculty development is core to expansion plans for any university. In Academic Year 2020-21, the University recruited 20 new faculty and will hire 20 more in the next year. By 2024, the University will have 110+ faculty. NLSIU is committed to maintaining a 15:1 student-teacher ratio to ensure high quality of teaching for all programmes. 

Finally, two new funded PhD programs - the Dr Menon PhD Scholarship and the Thakur Foundation PhD Scholarship - have been set up to nurture and promote legal research talent within the country. The Dr Menon PhD Scholarship, established in memory of Dr Menon, NLSIU’s founder and keen advocate of quality legal research, is the University’s flagship funded research program, in line with global standards for supporting PhD scholars. Funding costs Rs 22 lakhs per scholar over a three year period. The University is looking to raise Rs 10 lakhs from the alumni community towards the Dr Menon PhD Scholarship for AY 2022-23 during Giving Month.

Please click on the “Updates” tab for more information on NLSIU’s faculty and research updates and plans, or visit the University website. This page will remain live for donations beyond Research and Teaching Week.

Donations receive 80G (India), 501(c) (3) (US) and Gift Aid (UK) exemptions. We are happy to discuss batch gifts, project-specific contributions or larger contributions (greater than Rs 15 lakhs) with appropriate donor acknowledgements. Please contact nandita.ramanathan@nls.ac.in or alumnioffice@nls.ac.in to discuss this further.

Updates
9 Feb, 2022

For years, the National Law School of India University has been the frontrunner in legal education and academics. Today, as the study of law evolves into a combination of education and research, NLSIU is taking constructive steps to increase its research capacity and bolster the process of aligning academic and research outputs at the University. Recent developments on this front include faculty hiring and several research projects which are underway. The University looks forward to having a critical mass of professors and active full-time researchers on campus.


Faculty Development

With the expansion in the intake for the B.A. LL.B. (Hons) programme, and the introduction of the 3-year LL.B. (Hons.) programme, the number of students on campus will increase steadily over the coming years. To maintain its 15:1 student-to-teacher ratio, the University has embarked on a timely recruitment programme for faculty across courses in law and social sciences.


“There is a significant need for a diverse set of faculty. While we are looking at faculty who are committed teachers, we are equally interested in members who will contribute to our research portfolios. Therefore, we are keen on bringing in scholars whose teaching and research interests are aligned,” NLSIU Registrar Dr Nigam Nuggehalli said.


The University will hire up to 20 faculty members in the first half of 2022, to strengthen the academic programmes as well as head various projects, including empirical research at the University. We plan to advance the capacity of all faculty members, through systematic in-house programmes for faculty development, such as weekly faculty seminars to discuss in-progress papers and re-organisation of departments and teams under the aegis of senior or Chair professors.


Academic Fellowship Programme

NLSIU’s two-year Academic Fellowship programme is open to graduates and post-graduates from law, social sciences, humanities and allied fields, who are preparing to enter law practice or academic careers in law, public policy or the social sciences. The University is looking to onboard around 20 Academic Fellows in its first intake in the first quarter of 2022. This is an opportunity for the researchers to hone their research skills and contribute to ongoing projects at the University.


Dr Nigam said, “As a University, we place as much emphasis on knowledge creation as knowledge dissemination. We want to foster a culture of research and innovation in legal studies, and Academic Fellows are integral to that. With this programme, we hope to bring in a new set of enthusiastic and driven researchers who can help the University grow in its research output, as well as assist in the delivery of academic programmes.


While candidates are being recruited across disciplines, the University has identified focus areas, for academic fellows to align their contribution and output:


  • Law and Health: Exploring and evaluating different models and approaches globally, and assessing their suitability for different Indian contexts.
  • Law, Tech and Society: Delving into the legal and ethical concerns and challenges in utilizing new technologies in economic, governmental and social activities involving human interactions with these technologies.
  • Private Law: Assisting the government and regulators on fundamental questions on private law obligations arising out of contract, tort, laws governing property and corporations.
  • Legal System Reform: Shedding light on challenges faced by the justice system through some relatively overlooked approaches in the research on justice reform.
  • Criminal Justice: Conducting research that draws on large-scale field interventions, and original empirical research in areas such as pre-trial detention, gender-based violence, arrest and bail.


This expansion in the research capacity of the University is set to streamline and raise the overall intellectual and academic output of NLSIU as it anchors a wider set of inter-disciplinary research projects. Increasing collaboration between faculty and researchers will feed into the rigour of NLSIU’s academic programmes.

3 Feb, 2022

Continuing our focus track on the University’s research and teaching initiatives, we spoke to our Journals Editor, Nishtha Vadehra, on the University’s plans to establish an open access infrastructure for NLS publications that responds to the needs of researchers, faculty and students at the University and showcases their work in the best way possible. 


In this interview, Nishtha sheds light on the significance and key elements of this open-access infrastructure, including the introduction of Digital Commons to power the University’s repository, revitalising of journals, and streamlining of editorial and review processes at NLSIU. 


About our Editor:

Nishtha is an editor of academic and popular nonfiction writing, with a keen interest in bridging the two. Trained as an editor at Yoda Press, Delhi, she went on to work with the Indian Institute for Human Settlements, Bengaluru before joining NLSIU. 


She has worked in book and journal publishing, as well as independently with academics, researchers, development sector organisations and artists.


Tell us more about NLSIU’s plans on setting up open-access infrastructure and introducing Digital Commons at the University.


Digital Commons is a widely used tool for creating institutional repositories and ensuring the systematic management of publication workflows. Given the diversity of scholarly outputs that NLS produces—from journals and working papers to theses and commentaries—it makes sense to have an integrated platform to better manage and showcase them. This is part of the overall re-organisation of research publications to achieve and sustain internationally peer-recognised scholarly output, and importantly, to keep it open-access.


But let’s zoom out a bit. Universities, in addition to their core pedagogical function, have a broader role to play in the fostering of a research culture and the production of knowledge. Much of academic writing tends to be opaque in its articulation and hard to access—despite often being based on publicly funded research. On the other hand, the importance of research and practice feeding into each other cannot be overstated. How, then, do we open up these channels of communication and ensure a free-flowing exchange of ideas between those who teach, learn, research and practice the law? Journals, blogs, and other kinds of publications are key to this project. Their ‘impact’ is often reduced to citations, credits and rungs to the tenure ladder. But accessible scholarship has the potential to inform the practice of law in courtrooms and boardrooms, in the design and implementation of policy, and in the classroom through invigorated teaching, not to mention public good. In order for it to be truly useful, then, we need to publish quality writing that is relevant and accessible—both in terms of language and not being stuck behind paywalls. That is the larger impetus behind building out a comprehensive, open-access repository for NLS publications.   


On NLSIU’s journals:

I have had the happy task of going through NLSIU’s incredibly rich archive of faculty and student-run journals—two of which are almost as old as the University itself. Articles in these early issues document and analyse important issues of their time—is the New Economic Policy good for India? How do we think about judicial autonomy? What did women lawyers think of their profession in early 1990s Bangalore? They also offer critical commentaries on important cases. Besides coming across eminent voices like an Indian prime minister, judges and leading academics, what struck me the most was encountering writings by renowned lawyers, activists and scholars as students of NLS. These early glimpses of sharp, considered and critical writing by some of the best legal minds in the country today really drove home the point of student-led journals for me.       


Many more journals have been launched since, opening up new lines of enquiry across diverse fields of legal research and practice—from public policy, environmental law, to law and technology and business law. 

Details of NLSIU’s nine active journals are available here: (https://www.nls.ac.in/research/journals/).  


On key functions of the Digital Commons: 

How do we both consolidate this rich archive of knowledge, and strengthen research and publishing culture at the University? Digital Commons is part of the infrastructure solution. 

  • First, it will help us build an integrated open-access platform to showcase faculty, researcher and student writing. This includes journals, reports, working papers, and several other kinds of publications. 
  • Second, it will allow us to streamline review and editorial processes for all journals, taking away some of the drudgery of back-end processes, freeing up student and faculty editors to focus on what matters—the content. 
  • Third, it will help NLS publications get the visibility they deserve and help track their impact.


As Journals Editor at NLSIU, could you share your vision for the University in the years to come? 

The larger plan is to help strengthen NLS’ research and publication culture and ecosystem. This is not the work of an individual or even a group of people. It takes a community to build and sustain a vibrant intellectual culture. What’s happening now is we’re enhancing the infrastructure to support this: an integrated repository, Digital Object Identifiers (doi), ISBNs and ISSNs. While these will go a long way in easing up processes and enhancing the visibility of NLS publications, a thriving intellectual ecosystem ultimately depends on the combined efforts of writers, reviewers, librarians, editors and readers.  


Moving forward, in addition to students, faculty and researchers, we hope to count on the support of NLS alumni in various capacities: as writers, advisors, reviewers and ambassadors.   


And finally, can you share some of the short-term goals for NLS publications? 

The initial plan is to gradually migrate faculty- and student-run journals to the platform. This will include building new websites to house journals while respecting their distinct identities, training editorial teams on how to use the platform’s automated manuscript management tools, strengthening editorial and review processes, and less glamorous albeit important work like cleaning up metadata.  

We also plan to relaunch the National Law School Journal (NLSJ), the University’s flagship faculty-led journal. This includes strengthening its mandate and editorial strategy, bringing out a new issue, developing a professional website, and promoting its presence across key academic databases.


The recently launched NLS Blog serves as a platform to make NLSIU’s research-related output accessible to the public. It features original research and insights by NLS faculty and research scholars across disciplines. Going forward, the idea is for it to evolve into a dynamic space for the exchange of cutting-edge research and emerging knowledge.

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Organisers
National Law School of India University

National Law School of India University

Beneficiary Charity

Nandita Ramanathan

Nandita Ramanathan

Organiser

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