BENGALURU: After the success of its five-year BA-LLB course, the leader in legal education in the country, the National Law School of India University, is set to start a three-year LLB full-time residential program that will admit 60 students in the Academic Year 2022-23. The course will begin in July 2022 and students will have to qualify for an entrance examination prior to that.
This comes as a relief to those students who want to pursue a professional course in law at the top law institute in the country after their graduation but were constrained by time because the institute would only offer a five-year course.
The Bar council has approved the three-year programme and the schedule for admissions will be out by next week, committee members launching the programme told TNIE in an exclusive interview.
"Many students don't think of doing law post 12, but subsequently find themselves interested in pursuing a law course. But national law universities set up in the country in the last 20 odd year do not offer an avenue for them by a three-year programme," said prof Aparna, a member of the committee, adding that these are the students NLSIU wants to cater to -- the best and brightest from different disciplines.
In addition to the 24 core courses mandated by the Bar Council of India (BCI) the regulatory body of the institute, the three-year course will also have electives and interdisciplinary core courses. The pedagogical approach of participatory learning is a replica of the one that is implemented in the five-year BA LLB programme. But unlike the five-year course, here students won't learn different disciples in themselves, but they will be taught as perspectives on how one studies the law, said Aparna.
"You can take analytical, reasoning skillset from law and apply that to other fields. And likewise you can take from history techniques such as historiography and apply them to the study of law. Or for instance use tools of political science and apply them to the study of law. Law and economics is a thriving field," she added.
Just as the general culture of NLSUI, this course too is a full-time residential program.
However the option of being a day scholar will also be available, said Sudhir Krishnaswamy, Vice-Chancellor of NLSIU, adding that infrastructure development had already begun towards accommodating additional students. "The accommodation will be done in multiple ways, some will be augmentation, some will be new buildings," he said.
The 25 percent reservation for Karnataka students will be applicable for this program too, he added.