Stanford Program in Law and Society presents

Nikhil Chandra, a premiere Indian legal-education entrepreneur suggests that asking law students across the country similar questions can be instrumental in informing views on the state of legal education and training – even in elite schools – in the developing world. Reporting from his experience in law school classrooms across India, where he engages students to grapple with these questions, Nikhil Chandra presents his idea for an evolved pedagogical commitment to teaching law in society.

The focus of this talk is really how emerging nations are training new lawyers and educational elite to think about broad state sanctioning and democracy, if at all. This talk-cum-workshop will address, broadly, the movement from social contract to legal contract, the appraisal of law from a layman's perspective, the agency of legal classrooms in creating environments that can create the “right” lawyers and how, in many cases, this isn't already being done even in top schools.

He'll argue that if we are truly trying to train our lawyers to uphold democracy, we first have to question their assumptions about what it means.

Nikhil Chandra is the Founder and Chief Strategist of Rainmaker India, a learning, content and test management company focused on India's legal ecosystem. Rainmaker was also responsible for conceptualizing the All India Bar Exam, India's first benchmark test for practicing law (see http://www.rainmaker.co.in/). Before Rainmaker, Nikhil was a senior lawyer for AZB & Partners, one of the country's top firms.

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