Building alternative lawyering groups

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 year a number of interns worked with ALF. Among the interns were Jiti who is going to do her law, Anup, Neha and Nanditha from NALSAR, Thomas from NLS, Rajeev and Neela from NALSAR and Deepti from ULC. More recently, we have Ganesh Rao and Guru Prasanna, from the National University of Juridical Sciences (NUJS) as well as Anikita Singhania from the Government Law College (Mumbai).

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. We decided to have another meeting where we could discuss concepts of alternative lawyering. However, we have not yet found the time to take this forward. We do, however, have an email network for Bangalore law students accessible at bls_network@yahoogroups.com.

We also realized that the very existence of ALF has meant that a space exists for people interested in the alternative practice of law. This has meant that some socially committed lawyers and lawpersons have evinced an interest in being a part of ALF.