About ALF's Educational Initiatives

Educational Initiatives

ALF has made an attempt at reaching out to the public to initiate a debate on legal issues and contemporary problems through seminars and conferences. A seminar on the land rights of Dalits in the context of globalization was held between May 1-3, 2001. A conference on Alternative Lawyering was held in September 2001 where the pioneers of human rights lawyering were brought together. A year long seminar course on “Law and Culture”” was held in collaboration with CSCS, in which we had guest speakers including Partha Chatterjee, Rajveev Bhargava, Vrinda Grover etc.

ALF offered a three month course for the final year students at the National Law School on the “Illegal citizen”. This course was designed in a way as to integrate our practice and engagement with law in the courts, as well as our critical research. We also offered a three month course on Law, poverty and Development along with Gautam Modi and Solomon Benjamin for the III Year Law Students at NLSIU. These courses were extremely useful as apart from providing us the space to critically reflect on the work we have been doing has also been extremely useful in reaching out to the student community. This has in turn translated into students taking an interest in social issues, attending events organized by ALF and even doing placements in ALF.

Various members of ALF have been giving guest lectures in a number of colleges in Bangalore including St. Josephs, Mount Carmel’s, Roshni Nilaya (Mangalore), National Law School, Comit, Sri Sri Center for media studies, Christ College, and Mangalore University. The topics of the lectures have ranged from communal conflict and the law to copyright, media laws, child rights, sexuality and the law etc.

Since those of us at ALF have been lucky enough to benefit from the inspiration as well as encouragement provided by the few courageous people who have been lawyering for marginalized communities we have felt the importance of building similar supportive encouraging networks among law students. These networks we hope will translate into students who take up the practice of alternative lawyering in the future. One of the main ways of building these networks has been the policy of having law students’ intern with us. In the course of the last three years over, 20 students have worked with ALF.

Apart from the placement route we have also had a meeting with students from law colleges in Bangalore with the objective of initiating critical legal thought among interested students. .

In December 2002, we organized a workshop with Sarai on the Daily life of Intellectual Property which involved 15 student stipendiaries from different colleges. A number of these students continue to be actively involved in the debates that we had initiated in the workshop.

In July 2004 ten students were chosen to work on and present a paper on a workshop organised by ALF and Sarai at bangalore on emerging questions in intellectual property.

We have also been actively involved in speaking on alternative lawyering issues in various educational institutions including law schools, arts schools, media schools etc. This in turn has created interdisciplinary networks where students from the arts, law, media etc are involved in our activities.