NLU Jodhpur hired three full time teachers and an academic associate in the last twelve months including one professor, one associate professor and one assistant professor. These hires have bolstered the law school’s total faculty strength to 56 including 40 full time faculty members, 12 visiting members and four professors-emeritus.

University of Jammu law school founder director and ILS Pune alum Prof Dr KL Bhatia, former NUJS Kolkata teacher and Delhi University alum Dr Prabhash Ranjan, NUALS Kochi alum Sreeparvathy G and NLU Jodhpur alum Anindita Jaiswal joined between May and July 2012.

NLU Jodhpur vice chancellor justice NN Mathur said that he followed the concept of “student-recommendations” in faculty hiring at Jodhpur and that Ranjan’s hire was strongly backed by students.

“A very important thing which I have realised is that you get good feedback from students itself. I do talk to my students. When they go out for moots and internships, they come back to suggest [suitable faculty they met outside college]. Another thing I find is that students have a good knack to analyse [Resumes]. Many old people can’t do it. [For instance] if articles [written by an applicant] are plagiarised they immediately point out that the entire resume is managed,” said Mathur adding that the college is preparing to conduct faculty recruitment on 5 June.

Bhatia joined as professor of law, Ranjan as associate professor, Sreeparvathy as assistant professor, and Jaiswal as an academic associate. Jaiswal assists faculty members in their courses in lieu of fee for the LLM which she is pursuing at Jodhpur presently.

Bhatia said: “For the first time since my superannuation [in 2005] I am enjoying. There is absolute academic freedom, no interference and no politics [at NLU Jodhpur], the students are extremely excellent and my colleagues are all young and exceptionally intelligent – I enjoy having discussions with them.”

Sreeparvathy, who has joined NLU Jodhpur for the third time since her LLM said that while it was plagued with common problems such as a higher workload on faculty, she found Jodhpur’s administration “very cooperative” and the work culture “really good”, as compared to feedback received from her friends teaching in other national law schools.

“It is a very professional environment. We get to design our own curriculum, even though it gets presented to faculty,” she said.

Mathur said that in terms of faculty pay scales there is no separate scale at Jodhpur to attract foreign law degree holding faculty, but he takes a “case by case” consideration for fixing salaries. NLU Delhi has taken measures to increase the pay of foreign degree holding faculty, as reported by Legally India.

Mathur told Legally India that Jodhpur has an annual alumni faculty programme where applications are invited from all alumni stating the period for which they are interested in teaching at the law school, and six applications are selected each year. These six alumni teach at the university, and the university fully funds their travel and stay expenses.

Legally India is currently in the process of collecting faculty hire information from other colleges too. Please let us know if you’ve heard anything interesting in the meantime.

NLU Jodhpur 2012-13 academic hires