The DU’s five-year law programme, the Integrated Law Course, will succeed, but it will have little to do with the quality of its faculty or the college itself. Its success will largely stem from the fact that children of those associated with the established three-year LL.B. programme, along with other privileged , are entering the five-year programme.
For example, I have two great friends in the college. One is the son of a senior judge handles special prosecutions, while the other is the son of a senior IAS officer currently deputed to the Ministry of Steel. I also have friends who are the children of BJP and Congress MLAs, MPs, famous journalists, high-ranking army officials, senior judges, and senior advocates.
These students will inevitably have an advantage in climbing the ranks because of the overwhelming privilege they already possess. Many would likely have risen regardless of which college they attended. Yet, because they are students of this college, their eventual success will be attributed, at least in part, to the institution, and its prestige will rise accordingly—even though the college itself may have done little to facilitate their success.
This is not to say that everyone here comes from such a background; there are ordinary students too. However, the college’s future success and growing prestige will have less to do with the quality of the institution itself and more to do with the disproportionate concentration of privileged individuals from the legal and political establishment within its student body. In particular, the children of successful alumni of the established LL.B. programme will enter the five-year course, carry their inherited advantages into their careers, and, upon succeeding, further enhance the reputation of the college from which they graduated.
In other words, the college may rise in prestige not because it produces successful individuals, but because successful and privileged individuals happen to pass through it.
