Its important for the person commenting to be more matured and better informed. The introductory lines are judgements made without proper study. The journal took more than two months to work on with 18 research papers.

Zzzz

i agree with some of the points esp why are science papers being published through journal of a law school. I read few papers and did not find any connection to regulations etc. Was proper peer reviewing implemented?

Sniper is right about a whole set of things, but let me disagree wit ha few of his observations and add a few more.

1. A basic issue that I see is how the editors seems to have a lack of understanding about what is an inter-disciplinary approach (thats one of the claims made below by someone at 7.1.1). Just having some articles from scientists and a few others from lawyers does not make it inter-disciplinary. To call it inter-disciplinary, there must be some amalgamation of disciplines - the lawyer and the scientists must be able to work together, crossing their disciplinary boundaries to arrive at a solution to some research problem. that is definitely lacking here. we see stand alone articles about the law and science, without any reflection about amalgamation of ideas. Lets take the papers on reduction in pollution or concentration of pollutants (thats what most of the papers are about). These papers tell us that the lock down has had an effect - now what does that mean for the law or lawyers or regulators? thats something that needs to be explored jointly by scientists and lawyers - at least thats required to call it baseline interdisciplinary.

2. even the hard science papers are more in the nature of reporting facts (that pollution has been observed to be reduced etc.). That is just a report of observations - may be a magazine or a newspaper can publish it. it becomes academic worthy only when the authors can make some more contribution -some amount of theorising around it. The papers published in this issue does not contribute to the inter-section of law and policy. the only thing that has intersected are a handful of people who knew each other well finding an opportunity to individually write some papers and publish it in the same platform. There is nothing inter-disciplinary or trans-disciplinary going on here.

3. A large number of people co-authoring a paper is quite common in the hard sciences. this is because they will credit everyone who was involved in the project or experiment. Science papers are also quite short at times - just a few pages. So on the small number of pages and large number of authors count, I am not willing to draw any adverse conclusions per se. However, a large number of papers from the same authors in a same volume does not look good. its really suspicious. Another count of suspicion is that Mr. Abhijit Mitra has co-authored papers that spread across many disciplines - Labour, economics and pollution control (across river, water and land). Now that is quite some sweep. good scholars tend to focus on a small area of work and go deep in that. Mr. Mitra seems to have cut across so many domains of knowledge and published in all of them - generally that is taken as an indication of either (1) lack of quality' or (2) lack of depth; or (3) getting your students to add your name to their work I don't know which of these is the driving force here. That being said, it is still possible that Mr. Mitra happens to be a genius with expertise in all these domains of knowledge - but bad luck or some other unknown factors has kept up tied up in a place like techno India university (what is that?).

4. The centre thats publishing this seems to do quite a lot - I mean regulatory studies, public policy and governance. thats an interesting range of things to pursue. But for any meaningful study of these things, one needs more economists, social scientists and policy professionals. a quick look at the centre tells me that majority of the people who work there are lawyers with a handful of relatively junior social scientists and not a single policy professional. The CV of the coordinator and research follow, Mr. Shambhu does not demonstrate any previous work in policy, regulation or governance. The other Research Fellow, Dr. Jayanta seems to be more impressive - with at least some degree of policy exposure, at least in IP. The rest are really junior chaps with limited work experience. I wonder how these set of people (except may be Dr. Jayanta to some extent) can advance any conversation on something as complex as the intersection of law and policy.

5. the journal looks like a half-baked shabby attempt. it actually puts NUJS in a poor light for such poor quality of work.this could have been legitimately published as a magazine though. no harm in doing that. Also is techno India university some sort of big thing (I had not heard of it before - despite having lived and world in India in all my life) - I mean, NUJS is a premier institution in the field of law. is Techno India fit enough to collaborate with NUJS?

In a scientific article published by Springer nature there can be around 23 authors for a 5 page article. Please also check the authors profile of scientific papers...most of them have more than 10 scopes indexed publication.

Wow! Please read even one of the papers. The journal is not prestigious. It, in the current form, can serve as guide for no one (hopefully).

Jena yahaan bhi ghuss gaya?!

You are in luck. SPC was listed as faculty for some elective course at NUJS

Please dont conflate the two journals even if both are from NUJS. NUJS Law Review tries to carry well curated [b]legal [/b] articles so maybe submit your findings in some thematic journal. Check the NUJSLR content before trolling and don't disregard the efforts of the involved students based on the scholarship that some non teaching staff have endorsed.

While I agree with most of your points, where exactly should social science research output reside if not on paper? I mean, we aren't talking about scientific breakthrough of any sort here, right?

Matter enough for you to reply!

Haven't seen any in this thread. Many from the other side seem to be here though. And what's Chinese Community Party? Seems a rather wild event!

NIRF doesn't consider number of university run publications as a metric.

UGC does not have this journal in its Care list, nor does this accept money for publications I think. Hence it can't be considered a predatory journal either. There is therefore nothing that can be complained about under law. If you don't like it, don't read it or ask others to read it. It's that simple.

You should actually do some homework before commenting. Given your present state of knowledge that is.

still waiting

@Guest 2
Out of 18 articles Abhijit Mitra co-authored 11 and Sufia Zaman 8. Is it a journal of any institute or a family manifesto?

And the even more beloved PM and his Home Minister. I have heard that those two actually tend to kill critics. The one you mentioned probably does so too. So let's all get our last wills and testaments ready in case the IT Cells from both sides hack LI database for the comments.

nice try there.- to convert criticism of a shoddy journal, which is not run by any NUJS faculty or students as an attack against NUJS. People are expressing their dismay, concern and complete lack of quality control for something that has come out of NUJS.

the students, the placement and the alumni are all great and it should remain great. thats the reason why we are concerned when this sort of nonsense comes out of it.

A quote about another prank

About E-Journal

IJLPR is a teacher-run and non peer-reviewed & non refereed journal published (January and July) twice a year (Bi-Annual). This online Journal is managed and regulated by the STLD of WBNUJS, Kolkata.


Editorial Committee

Current Status:

Vice Chancellor of NUJS is ex-officio the chief advisor to this e-journal. Other advisors are Prof Philippe Cullet, SOAS, University of London, Prof Bhavani Prasad Panda, Vice Chancellor, Maharashtra National Law University [MNLU], Mumbai & former Professor of Law, Berhampur University, Orissa and Prof Manoj Kumar Sinha, Director, Indian Law Institute & Professor of Law (on leave), NUJS Kolkata. The Founder Editor & Editor-in-Chief is Prof (Dr.) Arup Poddar, Professor of Law, NUJS Kolkata.

Didn't know that Apollo Hospitals employ 'eminent professors' these days. Nor have I heard of any renowned academic from the Science community recently associated with St. Xavier's College/University or Tata Hospitals either. Going a bit overboard, aren't you? Must be all the sugar rush from binging during lockdown.

Not commenting on other matters, some of which are straightforward political and/or lack relevance in the context of the current discussion, but at NUJS, students have the highest level of autonomy of all NLUs. Even the students who hate the admin for multiple reasons, like I do, agree with that. In no other university do students get to decide exam schedules, submission dates, extensions of all sorts, student programmes, a sizable part of the budget and even some of the medal recipients and so on. Here all such matters are not only decided with student consultations, but students are the one who decide those to begin with and admin just puts the seal of approval on that. I am not commenting on whether that's a good or bad thing, although it clearly allows the admin to shirk its duties, leaving the onus of running the university at least in part to the students, which the latter certainly did not sign up for. So the point about students being treated as doormats is a completely misleading and false piece of info. I certainly have not seen anything like that in the past 5 years. I say this only for the benefit of those who are outsiders and might have thought otherwise from Comment 42. The insiders who are commenting here are all very much aware of it, whether they admit or not depending on their own agendas.
Of course, in matters that are under the spotlight like the VC selection, so far the students' demands have not been formally acknowledged or acted upon, but that's because of the fact that the decision-makers in the EC have their own agendas more than for anything else and it is going to take a monumental change in the Indian legal education sector before all the stakeholders' opinions are considered before making such decisions. What they fail to realise of course is that students would not have to keep making suggestions or interventions if only they do their job properly and make the best possible decisions for the university.

SB needs to apply first. He's a good candidate. But only managed to fulfill UGC requirements very recently with his doctorate. Till then he didn't or couldn't apply for even internal promotions. He's hands down the hardest working person at the place and an excellent teacher too.

This must be one of best articles on Indian law ever

In case your reference is to Comments 43 or 43.1, that person would have been considered an exceptional candidate regardless of the origin of his degrees. All his students say so, and that's the greatest certification that an academic can have. Regarding your overall point, I agree that NLU degree plus foreign LLM in itself does not guarantee quality. I have seen quite a few teaching across various colleges in India now who have such credentials, but are sub-par at best. At the same time, teaching at a place for 10 years does not guarantee quality either. You can survive in all Indian public universities even if you are a terrible teacher. So the day that seniority or number of articles published (instead of quality of said articles) cease being considered as a benchmark of excellence for academics in India, and are replaced by objective parameters for excellence, then there would not be any need to consider NLU degrees or foreign LLMs as benchmarks either. Till then, they are as good as any other existing 'official' benchmark. As for teaching different subjects, there is at least one field where current NLU grads in general might be ahead of current grads from traditional universities, the former get exposed to a wider range of subjects at the very least, which the latter could not have been though not for any fault of their own. Imagine someone trying to teach Competition Law or Air and Space Law or Biotechnology Law to students without having ever been taught those subjects. Only an exceptional teacher might be able to do that, not people in general.

Hello Guest 46: Don't try to obfuscate. Note the following:

1) No one is criticising the likes of Baxi (the original brains behind NLUs), Menon, MP Singh, Chimni etc. We are criticising certain corrupt stooges who are demolishing the institutions such stalwarts built.

2) Menon and Chimni were visiting scholars at Columbia and Harvard, MPS holds an LLM from Columbia and was a Humboldt scholar at Heidelberg, Baxi holds an LLM and JSD from the US and taught overseas. Same for other stalwarts like Sathe, Tripathy etc --- so they are all "foreign returned".

3) There were no NLUs during their time, the colleges where they attended were the leading ones. Today 99% of bright students go to NLUs, so why not prefer NLU alumni?

You lose all credibility the moment you feel the need to call a VC "Honble" and a research assistant a "Professor".

Senior faculty? How? He's been in this place for less than 6 months. He's not been recruited as a faculty member, but appointed as a research fellow of a research centre by essentially the funder of that centre, the state gov, without abiding by the rules of recruitment of the university. That position too is technically administrative. He's currently teaching an elective course like several other people on contract. At the most, he's a junior faculty.

Agree....better he should have been appointed as the Vice Chancellor of the University....Don't worry he will.

Disappointing that you spend your day going after people for not doing things that you want to do yourself, but aren't doing.

So what if he has 10+ years of experience? He's still a junior faculty insofar as this institution is concerned, till the point he's actually recruited here in a teaching position abiding by all the university regulations and through proper advertisement. The fact that LI isn't acting on your argument should give you a clue about its invalidity. Nothing wrong being a junior faculty. Why is it hurting your ego? Are you him commenting under a pseudonym? He at present is less than an Assistant Professor with tenure insofar as NUJS is concerned.

Why are you going to every thread and commenting the same thing over and over again? If any of your comments has been published, that means Kian has read it.

Because he’s been so shy and reticent on social media?

I have a genuine question after having read Shwetashree's piece. She wrote that law firms should require an applicant to get a clean chit from the SHC of their college. Which can be an organizational policy. I have got no problem with that, since every private body can have such policies. Her second recommendation is more problematic. She wants those students who have been held guilty of SH to be refused BCI enrollment. Now, this appears to contain several assumptions. One is that the ICC of our colleges and universities are actually capable of doing justice to any form of adjudication, something that many people including myself would object to from experience (the incapability works against both complainants and accused, though I've only been the former). The second is ICC and the college usually gives the student some form of punishment on conviction. Shwetashree's recommendation seems to clearly say that it is not enough. She is asking for a second set of punishment, one that may as well mandate the student to drop out of college altogether. Because if I can't even get enrolled, then what's the point of having a law degree at all? Academics is an option of course, but judging from Shwetashree's two recommendations, a third one that she probably missed pointing out is that the student should also not be allowed a job subsequently in any academic institution either. Therefore, my question is, after having been convicted, at which point of time can the offender be deemed to have been punished enough? What she is recommending is essentially mandatory rustication on conviction without any opportunity to finish the degree, because the effect would be the same. If that is indeed the case, then the POSH law should be amended accordingly, instead of this backdoor policy, shouldn't it? Mind you, I'm not saying that what she's suggesting is too much or too little by way of punishment. It's just that there needs to be clarity about the penalty in case of any offence. I'd be glad if someone in the know can shed some light on this.

LI, BB are all biased and pro-establishment. Only social media breaks the real news these days.

Really? Ramanuj is not Rafa Nadal, nobody really takes him that seriously to waste so much time and energy on this

Why? Swapan is applying there to be a chaprasi?

You must be the only person who takes Swapan Dasgupta seriously. Even his own party workers do not do so.

A lot of IP work and research actually requires a science background. One of the reasons why someone without a BSc/BTech degree can't be a patent agent in this country. You should really increase your knowledge before commenting on what other people might need for their research.
Disclaimer: I have no idea about the person referred to or whether he is any good.