N.R. Madhava Menon, a legal luminary and a tireless institutional builder, passed away on May 8, 2019, in Kerala.
He was known to have been the man behind the law school model of legal education in India. He almost single-handedly built the National Law School of India, University in Bangalore, and later went on to become the founding Vice Chancellor of National University of Juridical Sciences, Kolkata and the National Judicial Academy in Bhopal.
Prior to this, for more than three decades, he taught law at Delhi University. I had the privilege of working with him for two years at NUJS, Kolkata, and was in touch with him throughout. What I remember of Prof. Menon the most was his personal integrity and his unflinching commitment to bring legal education in India up to global standards.
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Law was, almost as a rule, the last choice and the quality of teachers and students it attracted was nothing to be proud about. Menon transformed the situation in a rather dramatic fashion within a decade to create NLSIU in Bangalore, which was routinely referred to as the ‘Harvard of the East’. It began to attract the best of the students, with 100% placement.
Many of the students who studied at NLSIU and NUJS are leading lawyers today, running law firms all across India. It is widely believed that the quality of litigation has been transformed for the better. Menon was also the harbinger of the idea of training and updating judges, who he felt would get out of touch with latest developments in law, technology, social sciences and literature. He felt that it such a system was indispensable for producing informed judges who could produce qualitative judgements.
The greatest challenge that Prof. Menon faced in starting the law schools was to produce a work ethic that was demanding and could meet the demands of the corporate world. He managed to attract the best students, but resources in teaching and quality of academic material available were behind on their times.
The success story of Prof. Menon was to deliver against odds and he did this using unique methods. I had freshly completed my PhD from JNU and joined NUJS. I distinctly remember, in the very first faculty meeting, he announced that nobody’s job is secure unless they deliver in class.
National University of Juridical Sciences, Kolkata. Credit: NUJS website
He went on to say that the Bar Council is in his ‘pocket and so are the judges heading it’, and that that the only way one can express their grievance if they are removed from the job was to ‘get some goondas and get him beaten up’.
Coming from JNU with an open culture of dissent, this was jarring yet intriguing for me. I took my time, and disagreed with many of his views. To my surprise, he not only encouraged and indulged it, but took a liking to me.
A conservative in his thoughts, he was a humanist at heart.
He went about creating a work ethic for both the faculty and the students. He put in place a rather elaborate evaluation of teachers by the students at the end of each semester. He would often walk into a class unannounced and encourage the students to question the teachers to see if they came unprepared.
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This, at times, made students irreverent, but one could always command their respect if one managed to deliver in class. He discouraged teachers from spending a long time chatting, and toyed with the idea of installing CCTVs to monitor them. I would often protest, calling such moves authoritarian and arguing that such surveillance methods would discourage an active academic culture from growing.
But what he managed through these mechanisms was to put institutions in place with a fair degree of accountability. He was battling against law teaching that according to him was lagging behind by at least three decades, and thought that these short cuts would short circuit the process. I, on contrary, felt it was useful to train students in a corporate culture but not in encouraging them to think fresh. We would often have very engaging discussions around this, but he never took it personally.
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NUJS quickly gained its reputation in a very short period of time, and Menon also ensured his students placed early. He would often tell me that poor work ethic is a disease in India and it was hard to disagree with him since it affects the good implementation of social security measures.
That issue remained with me and I asked Jean Dreze many years later that simply emphasising PDS is not good enough as long as we do not have a public spirited work ethic to back it. He would always tell me that most scholars who are left leaning rarely invest quality time in building institutions but are more invested in their own individual pursuit. Many of the issues he raised, though unconvincing, stayed with me to ponder over.
I was in charge of courses on human rights, and in the true spirit of a conservative, he would remind me of the significance of duties over rights. He believed in order and the extended role of the state. Politically, he was conservative, but due to his personal integrity and commitment to institutions, most governments of the day took his advice seriously.
He headed many government commissions, and was even a member of Justice Malimath Committee, whose recommendations are pending before parliament.
I had the opportunity to sit through the proceedings. Prof. Menon was concerned about the low rate of conviction and growing crime and lawlessness. He, along with others, suggested bringing in many of the provisions of exceptional laws into regular evidence act upturning many of the principles of ‘natural justice’ and jurisprudence. He was impatient with institutional malfunctioning at all levels.
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I would often remind him that crime cannot be fixed with draconian laws but needs a deeper social understanding. But his reply always was that everything cannot be put on hold for such drastic changes to take place. He mostly had a very poor impression of social sciences, which he said only pointed to problems but rarely offered solutions.
Finally, I remember Prof. Menon as someone who made it big coming from a very modest background. He would pore over a dictionary each day to brush up his vocabulary, in the good old style of keeping up with the vagaries of English. He was self-taught and self-made. It is always a difficult friendship at a personal level, when one takes a liking to someone but strongly disagrees with most of what they have to say.
But then again, to be liked by those you disagree with remains an enduring human quality.
Ajay Gudavarthy is an Associate Professor at the Centre for Political Studies, JNU. He recently published India after Modi: Populism and the Right (Bloomsbury, 2018).
