Neelakanta Ramakrishna Madhava Menon (4 May 1935 – 8 May 2019) was an Indian civil servant, lawyer and legal educator, considered by many as the father of modern legal education in India. He is the founder of National Law Universities system and first director of the National Law School of India University (NLSIU) and the National Judicial Academy, Bhopal and the founder-vice-chancellor of the West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences (NUJS). He has also served as Chairman of Indian Statistical Institute from 2002 to 2003. Menon was awarded the Padma Shri in 2003 and Padma Bhushan in 2020 by the Government of India. He was a member of the Law Commission of India and also member of several expert Committees including on Legal Aid (1973), Civil Services Examination Reform (2000-2001), and Criminal Justice Reform (2002-2003), Police Act Drafting Committee (2005-2006) and the Committee on Draft National Policy on Criminal Justice (2006-2007) and Committee on Restructuring of Higher Education in India appointed by the Government of India. He was a Central Secretariat Service officer. Biography Menon was born on 4 May 1935 at Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala in a middle-class Nair family to Bhavani Amma and Ramakrishna Menon as the fourth of their sixchildren. His father, a law graduate and a revenue officer working for the Travancore Corporation, died due to typhoid, when Menon was two years old and he was brought up by his mother, with the assistance of her brothers and sisters. His mother took up a job as a clerk at Travancore Corporation to bring up Appu, as he was known at home, and his three elder sisters and one younger brother; another one of his younger brothers died in childhood. Menon schooling was at Sreemoolavilasam Government High School, Thiruvananthapuram from where he passed matriculation in 1949 and completed the pre-university course in 1950, when the erstwhile two-year course was realigned as a truncated one-year course. His graduate studies were at S. D. College, Alappuzha from where he passed with a BSc in zoology in 1953. He also passed the Hindi Visharad course conducted by the Dakshin Bharat Hindi Prachar Sabha simultaneously with his graduate studies. He continued his studies at Government Law College, Ernakulam, but shifted to Government Law College, Thiruvananthapuram when the college was restarted in the capital city in 1953 and was the student editor of the college magazine in 1954–55. He passed the law course