Rankings via OutlookIndia.com Weekly magazine Outlook India has published its rankings of law colleges, following just a short while from rival India Today’s, which had left traditional top 5 national law schools NLU Jodhpur, NLIU Bhopal and NUJS Kolkata out of its top 20 ranks. Outlook has included...

Ramlu wants moolah: RMLNLU Lucknow on Saturday decided to raise its fees from the current Rs 80,000 per year to an, as yet, undecided amount, which “will be at par with other national law schools”. However, “the university will consider the financial status of students who come from UP before finali...

Previous years’ coverage of various national magazines’ law school rankings has turned into a bit of a media circus and has not really contributed in any way to improving the quality or transparency of Indian legal education.

The magazines’ law school rankings have been often criticised and little understood, while colleges’ rank often varied widely and seemingly randomly from year to year. Please feel free to read previous stories, drama and hundreds of comments on this topic.

Legally India has therefore taken an editorial decision not to analyse, publicise or give major editorial space to such magazines’ rankings.

National magazine Outlook India has ranked four national law schools as India’s best law colleges followed by two private Pune schools but following a spat with the magazine last year, NUJS Kolkata declined to provide data and was not included in the list while NLU Jodhpur re-entered this year in fourth place.

Outlook India defended itself against the criticisms in last year’s complaint by NUJS Kolkata professor Shamnad Basheer and two students against Outlook and India Today for publishing allegedly error-riddled and misleading law school rankings. Outlook revealed the details of its complex weighting system of ranking but declined to publish further information, in what the NUJS complainants called a ‘lackadaisical manner’.

NUJS Kolkata professor Shamnad Basheer and two students have threatened to complain to the Press Council of India about the law school rankings of national magazines Outlook India and India Today, which they allege suffered from “gross inaccuracies and methodological flaws” that violated “canons of journalistic ethics” and did a great disservice to students.

Indian weekly magazines India Today and Outlook India have both ranked NLSIU Bangalore and Nalsar Hyderabad as India’s top law schools, while NLIU Bhopal and ILS Pune occupied third place in each respective ranking and NUJS Kolkata found itself in sixth and fifth place.