Aditya Birla Group announces new BITS Law School; Rs 1,500 crore to be invested

A new law school, named the BITS Law School, will be coming up soon at the Mumbai campus of the premier engineering institute BITS Pilani. An investment of Rs 1,500 crore by the Aditya Birla Group has been announced for the same.

The declaration was made by the Group's Chairman and the Chancellor of BITS Pilani Kumar Mangalam Birla in a statement on March 10, Friday. The proposed law school will be built in an area of 63 acres. The first academic year will commence in August 2023, as per a report by PTI.

"The law school will cover all aspects of legal education, including a flexible and interdisciplinary curriculum, emphasis on creative learning, focus on legal writing and scholarly research, with strong digital underpinning across the programmes, and enabling access through generous scholarships," Birla said. He added that with a new vision, the school sought to re-imagine legal education to address contemporary and emerging problems of local and global significance.

Two popular five-year integrated degree programmes, which are LLB (Hons) and BBA-LLB (Hons), will be offered to the students. Technology and Media Law; Entertainment and Sports Law; Corporate and Financial law; and Alternate Dispute Resolution and Mediation are some of the prosed specialisation courses.

Some advisory council members of the law school include the former CJI UU Lalit; former Supreme Court judge BN Srikrishna; Pallavi Shroff, a managing partner at the leading law firm Shardul Amarchand Mangaldas; and Haigreve Khaitan, a managing partner at another law firm Khaitan & Co. Professor Ashish Bharadwaj has been named the founding dean of the new school.

"The law school will have a progressive, interdisciplinary, and technology-led approach to help students know the law, practice law, live with law, and empower through the law," Bharadwaj said. It has also been announced that scholarships will be awarded to meritorious students to enable access and preserve diversity.

The permanent campus for the law school will be built by next year. "It will be fully residential and is being developed by architect Hafeez Contractor in the Mumbai metropolitan region and will be a zero-carbon footprint campus to be operational in 2024," the statement by Birla said without disclosing the actual location, as per PTI.