I recently completed fieldwork across nine National Law Universities (NLUs) in India, ranging across Tier 1, 2 and 3 locations, as part of a UNFPA-funded Youth Project. The project explored how law students perceive personal autonomy and choice in legal and social contexts, to promote and protect the sexual and reproductive health of future legal practitioners.

My study revealed a striking paradox. The participants in focus group discussions (FGDs) were all law students, aged between 18 and 24 years. These students are thoroughly educated in a ‘rights-based’ framework, enabling them to articulate rights effectively in theory. Yet, they lack the basic, practical, and foundational sexuality education needed to navigate real-life intimacy, desire, and interpersonal relationships. I argue that NLUs function as important micro-ecosystems for Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE): they create discursive spaces that can catalyse social and legal change (the Mathura open-letter intervention is discussed as an example), but they also risk producing abstract knowledge unless curricula incorporate practical, desire-inclusive pedagogy and sustained, semester-long engagement.

What happens in a law school doesn’t stay in the law school – Why law schools matter as micro CSE ecosystems

The history of legal education in India shows how classroom conversations can spill into the world and reshape the law. After the Supreme Court’s judgment in Tukaram and Anr. v. State of Maharashtra¹ (popularly known as the Mathura rape case), law professors such as Upendra Baxi, Lotika Sarkar, and others wrote an open letter² to the Chief Justice challenging the Court’s reasoning on ‘consent’ and exposing how deeply the decision relied on assumptions about the prosecutrix’s supposed ‘promiscuity.’ That letter, which is now taught in many law schools, became a catalyst for public protest, feminist mobilisation, and eventual law reform. It helped establish the principle that a survivor’s past sexual history is irrelevant and inadmissible in such cases. This was later inserted as a proviso to Section 146 in the Indian Evidence (Amendment) Act, 2002. The trajectory of this open letter illustrates how ideas initially debated in law school classrooms can lead to profound shifts in legal doctrine and social attitudes. It was in this spirit that I chose to study NLU micro CSE ecosystems, to understand what a rights-based education does and does not do for future lawyers of the country who will interpret consent, power, and sexual autonomy in the real world.

Over the last decade, the legal curriculum has been updated to incorporate feminist principles and queer approaches. For instance, landmark judgments such as Naz Foundation³ and Navtej Johar⁴ are now part of core constitutional law teaching. Students across the NLUs we visited told us that their subjects increasingly centre questions of justice and sexual rights, and locate sexuality within a broader social and political context.

Many students described learning about these issues in law school as liberating; for others, it produced a cultural shock. This reaction underlines a deeper gap: most of the participants noted that they did not receive age-appropriate sexuality education during their schooling, and the law curriculum, valuable as it is, cannot substitute for foundational knowledge about bodies, relationships, and everyday communication. The inclusion of sexual rights language and bodily autonomy debates has created a discursive space, one reason many NLUs enjoy a “liberal” reputation. However, as the dissemination of our learnings with Agents of Ishq⁵ indicates, such conversations alone are insufficient. A rights-based curriculum cannot fully compensate for the absence of sustained, comprehensive sexuality education; without explicit attention to desire, intimacy, and emotional negotiation, legal concepts remain abstract rather than practicable.

Limits of sexuality education in a law school space

Ketaki Chowkhani (2023) writes about the limitations of a sexuality education⁶ that foregrounds only rights and justice without engaging with desire and pleasure. My fieldwork resonated strongly with her findings. For instance, in her work, she mentions how many of the young men she interviewed reported how it was most important for them to know ‘how to ask a girl out’, and did not really speak about ‘sexual rights’, or questions of ‘justice’ within the curriculum. I observed something similar among law students: on paper, they could recite the legal definition of consent, whether from Contract Law 101 (consensus ad idem)⁷ or from criminal law classes taught through infamous cases like Mahmood Farooqi v. State⁸. However, when asked how they navigate consent in their daily lives, clarity dissolved. Questions about intoxication, mixed signals, or changing preferences introduced hesitation. Students understood theoretically that consent must be continuous and specific, but they were unsure how to apply these concepts in real interactions. As Chowkhani argues, unless sexuality education incorporates desire and pleasure, it risks remaining purely theoretical, offering young people no real skills to practise in everyday life.

The comprehensive sexuality education NLU students want

Through our FGD participants, we learned that national law universities, across the board, did not provide comprehensive workshops or seminars on sexuality education, and participants were only introduced to it in the context of sexual harassment law and the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act, 2012. There were a few exceptional cases where the students were lucky to have sessions with progressive teachers. In one of the discussions, the participants shared that the former vice chancellor of their university had conducted a seminar on comprehensive sexuality education, which they found to be quite helpful. This represents a microcosm within a micro-ecosystem actively sustaining sexuality education. Yet such cases were rare, as most national law universities do not offer a structured programme; if workshops are offered, they remain optional, and meaningful engagement is limited. These examples underscore that while pockets of effort exist, they are exceptions rather than the norm.

Participants from one FGD noted that the student body in their university had organised a workshop on kink-positivity with experts and was given permission to do so by the administration. However, commenting on the efficacy of such a workshop, a participant remarked that while the session was helpful, it could have started from a foundational level, as many students lack the basic building blocks of knowledge about consent. The student said that it seemed like there was a desire to appear “progressive” because the University space allowed the students to have sessions on kink, but that without giving them basic information about sex, intimacy, and pleasure, this kind of workshop seemed tokenistic. Another participant in the FGD added that a lot of the students on their campus did not know the basics of consent, that it is supposed to be continuous and enthusiastic, so having sessions on what can be considered advanced sexuality education without comprehensive beginner sexuality education does not help the student body as a whole. Participants noted that most of these workshops were attended by people out of their own interest and were not mandatory. They said that, as a result, those in the student body who truly need to learn these concepts often do not.

Students thus reiterated an earlier point that was raised in our discussion about the obligatory nature of orientation sessions held in the first year of law school, specifically regarding the university’s anti-sexual harassment policy, which results in little to no meaningful engagement.

Our FGDs also included questions about whether a programme or course on sexuality education would be relevant in an NLU and how the participants might envision it being conducted. The participants felt that since the majority of students do not receive meaningful or substantive sexuality education during their secondary education, it should be the responsibility of the NLUs to provide them with this so that they can at least gain a basic understanding of their rights as sexual citizens of the country. The participants felt that such a programme should be made mandatory and transacted semester-wide for meaningful engagement. It was also suggested that the information should be gender-neutral and made as accessible as possible.
What these FGDs made evident is that a purely rights-based framework for sexuality education has limits. While legal and rights-focused curricula are essential for grounding young people in concepts such as consent, bodily autonomy, and justice, they do not adequately address the complexities of desire, intimacy, and relational negotiation. Engaging with desire is crucial; without it, there is a risk that sexuality education becomes adult-driven, reflecting what educators assume is necessary, rather than centring the real needs, experiences, and questions of young people themselves. For sexuality education to be meaningful, it must strike a balance between rights and desire, creating spaces where young people can navigate both knowledge and practice in ways that are affirming, relevant, and grounded in their lived realities.

References

1. (1979) 2 SCC 143 ↩
2. (1979) 4 SCC (Jour) 17 An Open Letter to the Chief Justice of India available at: https://aud.delhi.gov.in/sites/default/files/Admission%202014/PhD%20admission%202014/open_letter.pdf ↩
3. Naz Foundation v. Govt. of NCT of Delhi, 160 (2009) DLT 277 ↩
4. Navtej Singh Johar v. Union of India case (2018) 10 SCC 1 ↩
5. College Kids Need Sex Ed for Real Life- AOI X NALSAR #FeelingsInLaw, available at: https://agentsofishq.com/post/college-kids-need-sex-ed-for-real-life–aoi-x-nalsar-feelingsinlaw-6909707da647e ↩
6. Ketaki Chowkhani, The Limits of Sexuality Education: Love, Sex, and Adolescent Masculinities in Urban India. Routledge India, 2023. ↩
7. Consensus ad idem is a Latin phrase meaning “meeting of the minds,” to signify that parties in a contract must have a mutual understanding and align on the exact terms and subject matter for the contract to be valid and legally binding ↩
8. Mahmood Farooqui v. State (NCT of Delhi), 2017 SCC Online Del 6378 ↩

Cover image by Tingey Injury Law Firm on Unsplash