As many of you know, we’ve been tracking the diversity deficit at the premier law schools for a while now.
On some counts, its getting better (more students gaining admission without any real legal “ties” to the legal profession or judiciary etc) whereas on other counts, its getting worse (hardly 1% of students who made it to the top 5 NLU’s were from a vernacular medium school).
Unfortunately, we were quite late in releasing our last results (for the incoming first year batch of 2013-14). The Mint and LI have now picked up on this data in this piece here. Many thanks to all our team leaders and their teams who did a terrific job at collecting this data and crunching it.
- Here is a link to the Mint piece for those interested.
- Thanks to Geetanjali Sharma (an IDIA consultant) who helped summarise the data in this piece with me here. And to Vineet Bhalla for excellent assistance in rechecking this. Link here.
- Here is a link to all the diversity surveys done in the past by us. Thanks to Avdnandan Kundu (a former team leader at IDIA) and Donnie Ashok (an IDIA scholar who is also head of our IT team at IDIA) for painstakingly collating this and putting it up on the website. This can be accessed here.
- Here is a link to the longer LI piece on this.
- Also, this was the data relied on in NLS’s pioneering scholarship policy as well. Link here.
- As we argue in this paper, unless we fix the diversity deficit at the law schools soon, we’ll be faced with a serious diversity crisis within the top echelons of the legal profession as well (to the extent that some of these layers at the top will be fed in large parts by NLU candidates).
Many thanks to Swethaa Ballakrishnen, Tarunabh Khaitan and Bobby Kunhu for their valuable inputs on the diversity questionnaire that we administered to the law schools. We’re very fortunate to have them as our advisors.