The Students versus Larry Flynt: Bringing Popular Culture into the Law School

Abstract

This article is anchored in two narratives: first, that of law and popular culture scholarship and second, of the Indian law school. Starting with law and popular culture as a ‘ite’ of legal scholarship: this has often been the cast-off step child when it comes to the Indian law school. Two reasons for this—one, the subject itself, the difficulty that many academic circles have with taking it ‘seriously’, of keeping it on par with other more conventional areas of legal study and second, the law school’s resistance to change.

As for the Indian law school: Two decades from the establishment of the first national law school, there are rising doubts on the success of this experiment and whatever impact it may have had on the legal education system in India as a whole. A closer look at these institutions show that the veneer of adequate infrastructure cloaks an increasingly decaying framework. Whether it be the myopic aim (‘increasing the quality of the bar’), which itself has clearly failed, or issues of curriculum, methodology and evaluation techniques, the law school in India has fallen into an epistemic trap it is struggling to get out of.

It is at this juncture that I believe a focus on law and popular culture scholarship and pedagogic techniques at the Indian law school may well be one way out. Ranging from the need for making our legal curricula multidisciplinary, creative and flexible, to understanding how the very idea of focusing on the study of this area will counter the Indian law school’s troubling ‘resistance to change’, I make a case for inculcating the study of law and popular culture at multiple levels within the law school framework. I back this up with instances of just how pop culture can be successfully utilized to make for a more interesting learning experience for everyone concerned. My own experiences as visiting faculty on media law at two institutions have been invaluable in grounding this article in experiential reality.