COURTING DISTINCTION

The institute is gearing up its students with knowledge of new-age tools like Gen Al to prepare them for the legal battles of the future

- AJAY SUKUMARAN

The verdant campus of the National Law School of India University (NLSIU) in Bengaluru has had a makeover in the past year. A new amphitheatre has come up next to the library block while landscaped ponds have been built into some of the open spaces on the campus, to give students more space for interaction. Meanwhile, the main walkway has been redesigned with tactile paving to assist the vision-impaired. At India's premier law institute, where inclusivity and diversity are guiding principles, the infrastructure facelift is in tandem with its academic growth phase.

In 2024, the institute will welcome 300 students in its flagship BA LLB course, 120 in the three-year LLB programme and a like number in the LLM course, taking the total headcount across batches to around 1,300, says Vice Chancellor Sudhir Krishnaswamy. To keep pace with the growing student population, NLSIU has increased its faculty strength. "Starting July 2024, we will touch (a headcount of) 100 in faculty, and we will go all the way to 125," he says. This will help maintain a teacher-student ratio of roughly 1:15.

In academics, a big area of change over the past 12-18 months has been in Generative Artificial Intelligence, or Gen AI. "Law is one of those professions that is likely to be deeply disrupted by the emergence of Gen AI. For us, as a law university, that means at least three things," says Krishnaswamy. "First, we get our students to become expert users and familiar with these new tools but, much more than that, in a curricular sense, get them to learn how this technology works so that they are both designers and builders of this new tool. Finally, we think that, pedagogically, Gen AI has great potential to put a tutor in every student's phone."

WHAT SETS IT APART