Articles
Peel-Off Lawyers: Legal Professionals in India's Corporate Law Firm Sector
-Jayanth K. Krishnan
This study is about hierarchy within the legal profession - how it presents itself, how it is retained, and how it is combated. The socio legal literature on this subject is rich, with many roots tracing back to Professor Marc Galanter famous early 1970s article on the Haves' and Have-Nots.' Galanter's piece and the work of those influenced by him righty suggest that resources - institutional, financial, and demographic - contribute to whether lawyers are, and remain as, part of the Haves.' Yet, while resources of course greatly matter, as this study will argue other forces are significant as well. One set, in particular, relates to what the social- psychology literature has termed mobbing a phenomenon that contributes to the reinforcing of hierarchy through certain aggressive and passive tactics that those with power use to consolidate their reigns and hinder the upward mobility of the employees beneath them. In the setting of the legal profession, the result can be an environment where Have-Not' lawyers within an office are commonly left to feel insecure, powerless, and stuck in the legal employment positions in which the find themselves.
Women Leaders in the Areas of Higher Education, the Legal Profession and Corporate Boards: Continued Challenges and Opportunities in the United States
Many believe the "woman problem" has been solved, since women are now represented in powerful positions in government, academia, business, and the law. It is true that women today occupy more positions of power than ever; however, these numbers are quite small at the top level, especially or women of color. This article begins with an overview of women in the workforce and their presence in education; and then goes on to review the current data on women in three settings-higher education faculty, the law, and corporate boards. Next, it examines the barriers women encounter in reaching the top positions in their respective fields. Common obstacles women ace include: gender stereotypes, the struggles of balancing work and family life, a lack of mentors and mobility. The article concludes with potential solutions to the impediments faced by women.
The introduction of the one-year Master of Laws (L.L.M) has been touted as a game changer for post graduate legal education in India. This paper argues that, despite the unclear rationale for the course and the hastily put together course structure, the one-year LLM may transform postgraduate legal education if rigorous intellectual effort is invested in the process of translating the curriculum into active learning materials allowing for a critical pedagogy to emerge in the classroom. Using the Law and Social Transformation course in the two-year LLM as an example, the paper shows that despite a well-designed curriculum, the syllabi and textbooks developed subsequently effectively neuter the objectives of the course. The new decentralised institutional environment for the development of the one-year LLM, with the emergence of new private Universities taking the lead with course development, offers hope that the promise of the one-year LLM Will be realized
In Spring 2009, I embarked on a project to introduce the students in my first year, six-credit Civil Procedure sequence to the life of the lawyer in community, representing people, as most of them would ultimately live it.' My inspiration was my eight-year practice experience in Owensboro, Kentucky (pop. 50,000).' My tools were course design elements rooted in the lived experiences of individual litigants and prior students' contributions, which would demonstrate that our classroom was a "community of memory" with a past, present, and future.
Result: My most engaged class yet; vibrant reforms of my course design and delivery; improvements in my own knowledge; and many students who have remained closely attached to me even after graduation. I did not expect that in creating community we would upend the classroom hierarchy and create dense, complicated interpersonal networks. The teaching assistants and prior students who participated in class activities demonstrated that the past and therefore the future were very real. They shortened the distance between the classroom organization's status tiers and formed dynamic multiplex relationships with students. Our community became a living, breathing, evolving institution, just like the communities I had hoped to mimic.
Notes From The Field
The Law and Popular Culture course is one that holds great potential in transforming the law classroom into a more accessible, democratic, and vibrant space. With this in mind, how does one go about conducting such a course in the law school? This paper attempts to start answering that question. Based on the author's experience of conducting such courses at the National Law School of India University, Bangalore (NLSIU) and National Academy NALSAR University of Law, Hyderabad, the paper surveys a range of sources that may be used to construct the course, along with sharing the actual experience of teaching it.