Courses

Members of ALF have been teaching in various colleges for a number of years. We have taught courses at the National Law School, Asian College of Journalism, Nalsar, Mount Carmels College, Christ College of Law, St. Joseph's College of Arts and Sciences etc. We try to offer courses which offer a critical perspective on law and are inter disciplinary in nature.

We have also made  attempts at reaching out to the public to initiate  debates 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.

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.