Professor Menon, who was awarded the Padma Shri in 2003, has probably done more for the modern Indian legal education than almost any other Indian lawyer
On Tuesday night, Dr. N R Madhava, a renowned academician and the founder of modern Indian legal education, died (May 7). The 84-year-old had recently been diagnosed with liver cancer. His wife Ramadevi and son Ramesh Menon survive him. Menon was born in Thiruvananthapuram on May 4, 1935, to Ramakrishna Menon and Bhavani Amma. He earned his bachelor’s degree in Zoology from SD College Alappuzha in 1953 and went on to study law at the Government Law Colleges of Thiruvananthapuram and Ernakulam.
Dr. Menon’s family and students received condolences from President Ramnath Kovind. He started his career as a lawyer at the Kerala High Court when he was 21 years old, and then moved on to the central secretariat. Dr. Menon, who was more of a scholar than an advocate, moved to Delhi in the early 1960s. He became a faculty member at Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) in Aligarh, and later entered Delhi University as a professor in 1965, eventually becoming the director of the Campus Law Centre. He pursued his studies further and received his LLM and PhD from AMU in 1965.
He was also on deputation as Principal of Government Law College, Puducherry, and Secretary of the Bar Council of India during this period. In 1986, the Bar Council of India invited Dr. Menon to establish India’s first National Law School University in Bengaluru, laying the groundwork for a new five-year integrated LLB programme.
Dr. Menon was a strong believer in the educational institution’s position in helping the country’s legal system evolve and develop over time. To put it another way, he says, When law communicates with other branches of knowledge and engages with society, it expands. Legal education becomes more important and contextual as it is linked to social issues and movements. In order for this to happen, he wrote in an article for The Hindu that a liberal, holistic, and decentralised approach to curriculum planning and development is needed, with each university teaching law bearing primary responsibility.
Dr Menon’s expertise was sought by the West Bengal government and the Supreme Court in order to create the National University of Judicial Sciences in Kolkata (1998) and the National Judicial Academy in Bhopal (2003). Dr. Menon continued to contribute to the legal system after retirement, from serving on the Commission on Centre-State Relations to chairing the Government of India committee to draught a National Policy on Criminal Justice. He has served on the Indian Law Commission for two years. Dr. Menon was not only instrumental in changing the direction of India’s legal system, but he was also instrumental in educating lawyers and law professors at the National Law School. Dr. Menon has written over a dozen books in the legal field to share his knowledge and years of practise. ‘Turning Point,’ based on his work and life, and ‘Education and Public Health,’ are two of his novels.
