In a first of its kind, the honor Sujit Choudhry is bringing to India is par excellence. Even though Indian origin academics head many schools in United States with engineering, science, math and business fields but it happened in law for the first time.
Sujit Choudhry is a highly regarded constitutional scholar of Indian origin, who will now take charge as the Dean of the University of California (UC) Berkeley’s Boalt Hall, one of the top law schools in America. The New Delhi-born Choudhry is just 44 and has founded the Center for Constitutional Transitions after moving to California from New York University (NYU). He has received rave reviews for his scholarship in the area, including his co-editing of the Oxford Handbook of Indian Constitutionals Law.
Although, Law is not generally favored by Indian students studying abroad, almost 75% of the students from India go into the fields of engineering, math and science and about 15% go to business schools. This is as per the Open Doors report which monitors the foreign student inflow to the US.
Well, this large difference and favor for Oxbridge and London as the central points is largely attributed to the Indian legal history. Most of our scholars like Gandhi, Nehru, Jinnah, Patel have completed their courses from UK, only Ambedkar was the one who went to US for Law.
This might increase the number of Indian students going to the United States for Law studies in the coming years.