NLSIU Bangalore 1996 alumnus Shekhar Bobby Saraf is set to be elevated to the bench at the Calcutta high court, making national law university (NLU) history as the first NLU graduate to have made it to the higher judiciary.

According to the most recent update on NLSIU’s Facebook page:

Proud day for National Law School of India University, Bangalore. Mr Shekhar B Saraf, an alumnus of batch of 1996, becomes the first ever student since the inception of National Law Schools to be elevated as the Honourable Judge of the High Court. He would be joining the Calcutta High Court bench, pending formal warrant of appointment from the president of India.

We are delighted with this news. We hope this inspires a generation of law schoolites to take up litigation.

We wish him the best.

Saraf was appointed as a senior panel counsel for the Calcutta high court on 30 July 2010, by the law ministry.

He co-initiated a stipend support program for underprivileged freshman students at NLSIU last year, with three NLSIU batchmates, as then reported by the Economic Times.

NLSIU was founded in 1988 by Prof Madhav Menon, ushering in a new era of the five year undergraduate law degree offered by state-supported NLUs. As of today there are 16 different NLUs across India but no judges in the higher judiciary from any of them, and very few who have even made it to the senior counsel designation.

In January 2014, NLSIU 1998 graudate Akshay Bhan became the first NLU graduate to be conferred seniority. By that time 26 per cent of the partnerships across India’s six largest corporate law firms was being occupied by NLSIU alumni alone.