The NALSAR Row Raises a Bigger Question: Who Should Govern Law Universities?

The distinction between having a voice and exercising authority from outside becomes important during disagreements.

The question is whether a structure designed at the birth of the NLU experiment still draws the right boundary between professional advice and university administration.

(Photo: Vibhushita Singh/The Quint)

The dispute over NALSAR students has drawn attention to a little-noticed feature of India’s national law universities: the body responsible for professional legal education is also built into the governing structures of several of them. The arrangement dates back to the origins of the NLU experiment.

In a controversy that unfolded and changed course within hours on August 13, the Bar Council of India (BCI) first sought to prevent NALSAR University of Law’s 2026 graduates from being enrolled as advocates and asked the university to inquire into a student campaign opposing Chief Justice of India Surya Kant’s invitation to its convocation.

The BCI subsequently withdrew both the enrolment-related direction and the proposed inquiry. The controversy is also before the Supreme Court in Mihira Sood v Bar Council of India, where notice has been issued and the BCI has been asked to file its response within two weeks, even though the impugned communications have since been withdrawn. 

The immediate confrontation is therefore over. But it revealed something about the relationship between India’s law universities and the body responsible for maintaining standards in professional legal education that has received far less attention.

When the Regulator Sits on the Governing Body

The NALSAR University Act says that one member of its Executive Council must be nominated by the Chairman of the BCI from among BCI members. The Chairman of the Telangana State Bar Council is another member.

The Executive Council is not a ceremonial body. The Act describes it as NALSAR’s “Chief Executive Authority” and gives it the powers necessary for administering the university.

That makes NALSAR’s response to the BCI particularly interesting.

When BCI Chairman Manan Kumar Mishra asked the university to inquire into those behind the student campaign, Vice-Chancellor Srikrishna Deva Rao did not immediately proceed. NALSAR said it would first determine whether conducting such an exercise would be a constitutional use of its powers and consistent with its governance framework. The matter was to be placed before the Executive Council.

In other words, a request coming from the BCI Chairman was being referred to a university body on which the BCI Chairman already has a statutory nominee.

Why does a body concerned with professional legal education occupy a place inside the executive administration of a university in the first place?

NALSAR Is Not Alone

The answer lies in the origins of the national law university model itself.

The National Law School of India Act, 1986, which created the National Law School of India University (NLSIU) in Bengaluru, records an important part of that history.

Its Statement of Objects and Reasons says promoting legal education was among the BCI’s statutory functions. The BCI established the Bar Council of India Trust, which then sponsored the National Law School of India Society. Karnataka subsequently gave the project university status through legislation.

The professional Bar was therefore not invited into an already functioning university. It helped create the model.

That history was reflected in NLSIU’s original governing arrangements. The BCI Chairman headed its General Council, and the BCI and BCI Trust were given representation in its Executive Council. The logic was understandable.

For years, legal education had been criticised for being too distant from the profession students were preparing to enter. A new kind of law school was meant to combine academic rigour with practical exposure to courts, advocacy and the justice system. Judges and practising lawyers were therefore given prominent roles.

As the NLU model spread, elements of this arrangement travelled with it.

NALSAR’s statute places Bar Council representatives on the Executive Council. Its Academic Council also provides for representation from the BCI and State Bar Council.

The pattern appears elsewhere.

At National Law University Delhi, the governing structure includes the BCI Chairman or a nominee as well as the Chairman of the Bar Council of Delhi or a nominee. Bar Council representation also appears in its Governing Council.

This does not mean that the BCI runs these universities.

At NALSAR, for example, the Executive Council contains university representatives and government officials alongside members connected with the Bar. Decisions belong to the body collectively.

But the distinction between having a voice and exercising authority from outside becomes important when disagreement arises.

That is what the events of 13 August unexpectedly brought into view.

Two Routes into the Same University

The BCI already has a defined relationship with law universities through its Rules of Legal Education, 2008. Those rules deal with matters such as recognition of law degrees, standards of teaching and inspection of institutions offering professional law programmes.

That is one route through which the BCI deals with universities.

The founding laws of some NLUs create another: they place members of the Bar Council system inside university bodies.

Normally, the two arrangements may coexist without attracting much notice. The BCI can bring the profession’s perspective to discussions about legal education while the university manages its affairs through bodies created by its own law.

The NALSAR episode posed a more difficult situation.

The BCI Chairman sought a particular exercise from the university. NALSAR responded by referring the request to the body empowered under its own law to administer the university. Sitting on that body, by statutory design, was the BCI Chairman’s nominee.

The issue therefore returned through an internal route to an institution that was already represented within NALSAR’s decision-making structure. That circularity is more revealing than the short life of the original BCI directions.

Why Give the Bar a Seat at the Table?

There are good reasons for the legal profession to participate in legal education.

Law schools train people who will become advocates, judges, academics, civil servants and corporate lawyers. Practitioners can help universities understand the skills needed in courtrooms and chambers. They can contribute to clinical education and ensure that teaching does not become detached from professional reality.

But there is a separate question about where that participation should occur.

Input into curriculum or professional training is one thing.

A place inside the body responsible for the executive administration of a university is another.

An Executive Council may deal with questions extending far beyond professional legal training. They can concern university administration, appointments, finances, student affairs and the exercise of powers under the institution’s own statute.

Once these different functions are placed within the same structure, lines that look clear on paper can become blurred in practice. The NALSAR episode provides a rare example of such a line becoming visible.

A Design Worth Revisiting

India’s first national law school emerged from a close partnership between the organised Bar and a State government. That relationship was one of the innovations that distinguished the NLU model from conventional university law departments.

Nearly four decades later, the model has matured into a nationwide network of universities with their own faculty, students, research programmes and administrative structures.

That makes it reasonable to ask whether every feature inherited from the founding moment still serves the same purpose. The question is not whether practising lawyers or Bar institutions should be kept out of legal education. Their contribution can be valuable.

The narrower issue is whether professional participation in academic life requires statutory membership of bodies exercising executive authority over universities.

NALSAR did not have to answer that larger question on August 13. The BCI withdrew its request before the Executive Council was required to consider it. But the episode offered an unusual glimpse into an arrangement that normally attracts little attention.

The BCI approached NALSAR as a professional body asking the university to act. NALSAR responded by turning to the institution created by its own statute to decide whether it should do so. Yet the BCI itself has representation in that institution.

There is no inherent contradiction in the profession having a voice in the education of future lawyers. The question is whether a structure designed at the birth of the NLU experiment still draws the right boundary between professional advice and university administration.

That distinction becomes especially important when the issue before a university has little to do with curriculum, classroom standards or professional training, and instead concerns how the institution deals with its students, teachers or internal affairs.

The NALSAR controversy therefore leaves behind a question larger than the particular disagreement that produced it. India has spent nearly four decades building national law universities as centres of higher education in their own right. Their relationship with the profession need not remain tied forever to institutional arrangements inherited from the first law school.

The BCI’s presence inside NALSAR’s Executive Council was designed to bring the Bar into legal education. August 13 showed why it may now be worth asking a different question: when does participation by the profession stop being educational input and begin to blur the university’s authority to govern itself?

(V Venkatesan has covered Indian politics, Parliament, and the Supreme Court of India for over three decades. He was Senior Associate Editor with Frontline and later Editor of The Leaflet. He is currently Contributing Editor at Supreme Court Observer. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)