During 2000s, many wittingly used to say that in India, 'those who cannot do anything, do law'. Where the popular aspirations of law students were either judiciary or litigation- corporate, or advocacy with a family support, no one willingly opted for teaching law. It would be difficult to imagine anyone who studies law by choice ,without an exposure to the glory of law visualised through a red beacon car in movies, or name plate bearing cars in reality. If one chooses law, it would further be difficult to imagine someone's plan A to be teaching law. So, what should an individual do whose first choice is law teaching? Or those who cultivated (later) law teaching as their first choice?

The rewards of being a teacher are abysmal when compared to the kind of physical, mental, emotional and intellectual labour the legal academia demands. A legal academic pours in these diverse forms of labour into classroom discussion, quizzes, parliamentary debates, moot court exercises, conference, workshops, and other extensions of academics. Beyond this, a legal academic must organise certain events that generate social media capital for the academic institution. One is also expected to work on receive research grants for projects by various ministries and organs of the government. Legal academics are also expected to guide the post graduate students for their research in their dissertations, and PhD scholars in the doctoral research. Besides all these things, which are considered as merely an extension of teaching, one is required to engage in serious research. Most of the leading academic institutions in India require a minimum of one to two research publications in a year. These diversely demanding coinciding and superimposed layers of fronts at which a legal academic is needed, is unimaginably overwhelming.

Myriads of expectations

What happens when one must perform these demanding roles of teacher-organiser-mentor-researcher? In law school's semester (or Trimester systems as in NLSIU Bangalore and NLIU Bhopal), teaching is taken seriously by the teachers, students and the law school, unlike the average state level college education system in India. A law teacher must not merely offer direct answers, but provoke the students' curiosity to question the settled answers. So, a law teacher must not merely handhold the students by explaining the factual and theoretical backgrounds of the course contents, but also take teaching as a provocation in Upendra Baxian sense, invoking their critical thinking,one that takes years of mental, emotional and psychological learning and unlearning for the teachers themselves.

The University accrediting systems in India are over ambitiously unreal –the components of patents, and designs that they have for top-notch engineering, science, management institutions, is the same as that for the law schools. Consequently, the law schools minutely manage the research output of the individual teachers, and their research centres. For research, the law teacher would need Kafka's solitude, not of a hermit but, of a dead man for writing. The law teachers must read and write in a way to navigate their way to the journals indexed in the world's top most indexing systems such as Scopus, which primarily is dominated by the Global North.

These all are the broadly sketches of what is expected of a law teacher in law schools in India. The true picture of each law school can be different depending upon the teacher-student ratio (which then decides how many class lectures per week would a teacher take); a well-equipped and skilled staff (without which teachers are pushed into drafting note sheets, budgets, file preparation for various academic visits by external agencies and audits, drafting of various minutes of the meetings, admission document verification and so on); and other infrastructural and academic assistance and aids.

Exerting weigh of the expectations

What should a law teacher then do? Some of the law teachers have given their life to the juggling of this quadruple role, often seamlessly. But what about others? Some law teachers become teachers, they prioritise their teaching, over organising events and engaging in research. Their names do not appear on flex or notice boards or the ticker on University's website for upcoming events, or social media profiles of the University; and in the research journals. Some other law teachers have become event managers, the blue-eyed not-so-teachery teachers of the law schools, who are valued highly and can substitute their class teachings with their research scholars, and find mention on the websites, posters, and social media. Some law teachers are smart they are teachers, they manage a few events, and engage in research. Some interestingly are pulled towards predatory publishing. A few get their research published in shady payment-based journals and get incentives for those publications from the law school. The extent to which law teachers are pushed to match up this quadruple role is, more than an individual-level lack of honesty and integrity, a systemic issue.

A law teacher I know teaches constitutional law through bare provisions, real life illustrations, and case laws. She takes students to the library to illustrate to them the art of distinction between analogue and digital library, and that how one must be acquainted well with the analogue library to be able to use digital one. She writes a self-reflection on his teaching to map what teaching exercises possibly translated into which skills among the students, including the kind of projects taken up, the kind of questions set for the examinations, etc. For a handful students, she is a good teacher, but others find his expectations utopian. She does not “tell” her research scholars to ghost write for her, rather invests much time on the scholars to assist them in the learning, reading and writing process. Her attempts in writing research articles involve far more time in his kind of ideations and articulation, than what an ordinary researcher caught up in a predatory journal publication would take.

Another law teacher invests most of his time in research. His name appears as the first or second author in his research scholars' publications, sometimes even without knowing the title of the publication. His classroom discussion involves making students write short pieces on his current research and submitting it to him, which then he uses in building his research. He does not see this as unethical. The pressures of the quadruple role blur his vision of ethics. His scholars cite him, so do his students who are made to read his current works. In the politics of citations, he writes sparse but weighs higher than the serious teacher and dense researcher in the previous paragraph. This leads us to question, how lack of honesty and integrity can be compensated with research, and how the Indian higher education system rewards lack of honesty and integrity. A reward system involving objective yardsticks where number of projects, publications or events outweigh their quality, is the pressures that are felt by the law schools, which then is transferred to the teachers and translates into ethical compromises of varied degrees.

Is there a way forward?

With far lesser mental and emotional contributions, a law student would become a judicial officer, and a better one; than with the commitments required for being a teacher (objective minimum eligibilities outlined by the UGC), a good-provocative teacher that Upendra Baxi hopes us to be, or a good teacher-researcher that aspires Derridean dead man. Indian higher education systems and therefore its law schools are built on flawed expectations, if built on the right expectations, then become flawed eventually with the weight of additional burdens of poorly equipped staff, libraries, endless loop on being relevant on social media and others. We collectively kill the good law teachers. A few who are still alive are thriving and sustaining as they are in the top three law schools of India. Other good law teachers in law schools who might also be good, defying all the pressures of quadruple role, are exceptions, and not the rule.

Does the Indian Higher legal education expect the law teachers to be Albert Camus's Sisyphus pushing the rock uphill only to see it roll back without the fear of bones and spirit being crushed? Should law teachers be expected to push a bare minimum weight in their quadruple roles? Should a law teacher be honest in one role and dishonest in the other? Or does the legal education system through the overwhelming weight, in a way, allows for the ethical compromises that a law teacher must choose? Is there a systemic production of a superficial teacher, one who tick boxes most or many roles superficially?

Is there a way forward ? May be only after a thorough reset of whats, whys, and hows questions of legal education. What does the current system promote in law teachers? What do we exactly expect from our law teachers? Why do we have inflexible and objective yardsticks? How to account for the unsaid labour of teachers compensating the lack of skilled and efficient administration, and staff? How do make the performance of a law teacher reflective of the quality of class teaching, quality of research output, diversity of engagement with the peer, scholars, students and staff? These are handful of basic questions to begin with, but they underlie other finer questions, which till the time remain unaddressed, a law teacher must continue pushing the rock uphill like the Kafka's dead man-researcher and the Baxian teacher-provocator.

Author is an Associate Professor at CNLU Patna. Views are personal.