COURSE DESCRIPTION

This course serves as an introduction to legal studies for incoming undergraduate students. As per the Bar Council of India (BCI) Rules on Legal Education, 2008 it is a compulsory course as part of the Five-Year Integrated B.A., LL.B. (Hons.) programme. It seeks to provide a foundational understanding of the place of law in our social systems as well as a set of skills that are needed to examine formal legal sources such as the text of legislations, judicial decisions and administrative materials. We will also be conscious of the interdisciplinary character of legal studies and try to introduce some of the central ideas that will help the students to navigate the early stages of their course-work at NLSIU. We will attempt to do this by going through a representative set of readings that will help the students to think about legal processes and controversies with considerable depth. More significantly, we hope that our students will become comfortable with the notion of arriving at multiple answers to a given problem and evaluating them from different points of view.