Professor Upendra Baxi, the former Vice Chancellor of the University of Delhi is considered one of India's pre-eminent legal scholars. Noted for his activism in the field of human rights, his pioneering endorsement of social science methods in law teaching, and his scholarship in comparative constitutional law, the Government of India, on January 25, 2011, conferred the Padma Shri award on him. He spoke with Vikram Raghavan, and Rainmaker's Aju John. This is the second part of the interview. Upendra Baxi's article, Notes towards a socially relevant legal education (download .pdf here) was published in 1979. At that time, he was two and a half years old in Delhi University, and he had organised workshops to "transform the landscape of teaching, research and hopefully, legal thinking". "This had been my first teaching assignment in India and I noted with horror, what passed off as legal education in India. Education was mostly doctrinal, and the question of what law ought to be was never posed except in some optional courses." He said that even though there was nothing wrong with doctrinal legal education, because it is important to understand how lawyers and judges think, it could only be a part of legal education in one of the most impoverished societies in the world. "So I brought my activist experience at Berkley and Sydney and it received so much support from my seniors and other pioneers of modern legal education in India. While it was not revolutionary, it marked a change in the thinking about how to teach and research law. One of the enduring changes was to say that you have to have some social science based understanding of law - that can only be attained by having conversation with different research methods." Following these workshops, courses on comparative jurisprudence and social sciences and legal methods were introduced at the Masters level. "From that, I realised the need to do a series of workshops for social science teachers on certain problems which I thought could be studied by a combination of law and social science methods. We held three workshops in the summer of Delhi on conflict settlement, agrarian reform, and minority rights - and out of that web emerged a climate that would support inter-disciplinary research in law." However, there were concerns that young scholars who write empirical studies of law may not get employment. Hard-headed law teachers would often say this was only soft law. "So we held a series of workshops at the University of Karnataka in Dharvad, with eminent law teachers, which was my way of inducting them. Finally, I struggled with the Indian Council of Social Science Studies, to consider law a field of study in social sciences. In 1974-75, this was accepted as a matter of policy. That meant that young researchers could get grants. When I look back, I realise that we for the first time, began producing multi-disciplinary researched texts on subjects like juvenile delinquency, and prison reform, which have actually gone into reform proposals."

• published: 03 Feb 2011
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