The number is actually over 20. People keep making such comments down here without checking facts first.

This is an old scam at NLSIU. When I was there it was so funny to see Venkata Rao (the VC) bow humbly before the parents of some of these NRI kids when they came to campus to "inspect" the environs ( a polite way of finding what the going rate for a seat was). Coming in fancy cars and SUVs Venkata Rao himself would come out of his office to welcome these people whereas "ordinary" students would have to keep pestering his staff for an appointment in case their parents wanted to meet him. What's amazing is how he's not only kept it under wraps but also managed to get a second frickin term as VC.

Such nuanced feedback.

Agree in principle, those things are issues, but you'll find it's not a simple matter of us focusing on issues - most are bigger and more endemic.

One thing I feel that LI does which is more important than a lot of those micro issues you list, is focus on the lack of effective BCI oversight of the profession and of law schools, which has a knock on effect (and is arguably the cause of) a lot of these other things...

You might feel that some of the issues we report are trivial, but they are all form part of the picture and assessment you are able to make by creating transparency.

Would you know there's a lack of jobs if we didn't 'blindly reproduce' placement data. (Which we don't incidentally - there are several law schools' placements we haven't published yet since they provided us incomplete or fudged data, unlike other online publications)

Or that law schools are run like fiefdoms with arbitrary rules, banning fests, dresscodes, etc? Or that there's issues around diversity, if we didn't cover Shamnad Basheer's IDIA or the surveys they do?

Happy to dig out examples for each of the above and more.

We're nowhere near done yet, but I hope we are chipping away at these kinds of things, and no one else in the media seems to really be willing to help on that front either.

In response to your individual suggestions:

1. Is this something that anyone is *not* aware of? 'Islands of excellence' is almost a cliche at this point... Sure, we want to evaluate faculty quality and are working on the survey but it's not a quick fix or a matter of doing a story or two on them or quoting someone else who says the same thing.

2. You mean teaching doesn't pay enough?

3. Shoddy infrastructure is not news as such, it's a state of being - we can do one or 2 thoughtpieces or columns at most, bemoaning the terrible infrastructure at law schools, but do you think that'll make a difference? We have done a number of pieces on the funding and budgets of law schools, which is presumably part of the reason for poor infrastructure, since some states don't provide enough funding (while others like UP, for instance, pump a lot of money into RMLNLU so they have good infra).

4. Corruption etc - Agree would love to cover, that'd be quite a story but do you know anyone who's willing to talk on that rather than just hearsay? If you have more info, please get in touch confidentially but a lot of leads we chase up in that realm end up not being strong enough to publish unfortunately.

5. Lack of jobs: We have written about that plenty of times I think - can dig out articles if you don't believe... Again, it's not something anyone is unaware of though - it's a continuing state of affairs rather than news.

6. NLUD vs CLAT: We have written about or referred to that a bunch of times (unlike anyone else), but how often do you want us to flog that horse? If the courts don't take notice, no one files a petition and students are happily applying to NLU D anyway, I feel like we'd be running out of news angles.