Now, a laboratory for law graduates in Mangalore 

MANGALORE: Science students fiddling with beakers, test tubes or any other apparatus in labs is a common feature. 

Giving similar hands-on-experiment to law graduates in a first of its kind initiative for any law school in India is the law laboratory at SDM Law College and Centre for Post-Graduate Studies and Research in Law here. This lab is useful not only to law students, but also for legal professional and even for the general public.

Legal process is evidentiary in nature. Familiarity with umpteen number of documents is the lifeline for advocates.

The lab has more than 150 types of documents connected to legal profession. While students are informed about the documents in theoryclasses, most of them will get a feel of them only when they enter the profession.

A result of pain-staking efforts by BK Ravindra, the college principal, for over a year, the laboratory in its inceptional stage has already won accolades from the National Accreditation and Assessment Council (NAAC), peer committee of the Bar Council of India and the National Law School of India University (NLSIU), Bangalore. Uday Kumar, professor of law, has also played an important role in enhancing the collection and setting up the lab.

"Students get to know about the documents in their classrooms. The confusion about the use of these documents that they face once they start practising law is what prompted the college to set up the lab," said Ravindra.

On display at the lab are copies of handwritten, typed and computer-generated judgments of Supreme Court and high courts. "These are rare and we managed to collect them with the help of our personal rapport with advocates and officials working there," he added.

In addition to the documents, the lab has charts pertaining to structure of courts, history of the legal institutions as well as names of legal luminaries, past and present. "This information too is very useful to law graduates," he said. 

Asked if Karnataka State Law University is planning to set up a similar lab, Ravindra, who is also the dean of KSLU said, "Setting up a lab is an expensive process and we have succeeded here only because of the support of the management."