Recently, in August 2026, the Supreme Court of India in Bhumika Trust v Union of India modified its 2025 holding in which it had held that law graduates must have at least three years of court practice before they could appear for judicial services exams for recruitment as Civil Judges (Junior Division).
Now, for recruitments notified from April 2027, candidates will only need to complete only one year of actual practice instead of three. If they clear the exam, they will need to complete one year of training at a State Judicial Academy and one year of law clerkship under judicial supervision. The court hopes that such holding would make the lower judiciary more inclusive particularly for women, persons with disabilities, and young lawyers. Let's grapple with three issues.
A pertinent question to grapple with is: What should be the pedagogical aim of legal education that is imparted to judicial services aspirants to make the lower judiciary more inclusive? Generally, government employment, including judicial services, holds considerable appeal in India, especially in cities, towns, and villages where private-sector opportunities are limited. And for students from non-privileged backgrounds such exams are important routes to socioeconomic mobility. But reducing work experience requirement from three years to one is a Band-Aid approach for encouraging inclusion in judicial recruitments, while structural issues persist. A persistent structural issue is that law schools, professors, and judicial recruitment committees let judicial services aspirants uphold judicial recruitment exams as the primary aim of their legal education. The aspirants devote substantial time to the subjects that are in the judicial services examination syllabus. They make notes and learn judicial exam techniques. As a result, the aspirants consider important educational activities like moot courts, debates, academic research, clinical activities, internships and interdisciplinary study as secondary, and sometimes, even irrelevant.
Legal education is not primarily for preparing for a recruitment examination. The aim of legal education (and liberal arts combined with it) would remain insufficiently achieved if such legal education produces graduates who are skilled primarily at recalling legal provisions or answering competitive-examination questions while remaining poorly skilled at legal research, writing, and critical thinking.
Second, the gender inclusion issue.
According to Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy's 2018 report written by Arijeet Ghosh, Diksha Sanyal, and Nitika Khaitan, women in lower judiciary across India are only 27.6%, whereas men are 71.4%. The Supreme Court reduced the practice requirement to make entry into judicial services more inclusive for female aspirants. But, even the one-year practice requirement will be a hurdle for female law graduates from marginalized social groups. Among them marriages commonly take place without paying adequate regard to careers of women. Secondly, hardships that young lawyers experience are more strongly felt by women and persons with disabilities because of working conditions in courts and inaccessible court infrastructure. So, the one-year practice rule will remain counterproductive for gender inclusion.
Third, bright minds remain stranded
To recruit brighter graduates in the lower judiciary, instead of adding a practice requirement, High Courts need to facilitate promotion of lower court judges to higher judiciary. A structural issue is that the brightest of the lower court judges remain stranded in the web of lower judiciary. The data speaks for itself. The sanctioned strength of High Court judges across India is 1,114. However, only 233 lower court judges were elevated to High Courts. In each of the states, a small percentage of them were elevated to their respective High Courts: Tripura (40%), Himachal Pradesh (35.29%), Delhi (31.67%), Uttarakhand (9.09%), Chhattisgarh (9.09%), Telangana (11.90%), Odisha (15.15%), Bombay (17.02%), and Sikkim (0%).
Surprisingly, for an exam like civil services the minimum eligibility requirement is bachelor's degree. Whereas, for the judicial service exams, a law degree along with or in addition to a bachelor's degree and one year of practice experience is clearly anomalous. One year experience is not even adequate for graduates to understand the judicial system better. Many years are required for lawyers to understand how courts function and furthermore years may be required to nurture their judicial minds. A better solution probably was to extend judicial training successful judicial examinees to about 3 to 4 years before they start serving as Civil Judges (Junior Division).
So, inclusion in the judiciary cannot be ensured by reducing the practice requirement from three years down to one year for law graduates to become eligible to sit for judicial services examination. A genuinely inclusive lower judiciary would be preceded by legal education that produces well-rounded law graduates who can write, research, speak, and think critically, irrespective of what their socioeconomic background is. Such graduates would also have a stronger hope to be elevated to higher judiciary, provided High Courts sincerely introduce structural changes to facilitate such elevation.
Author is an Assistant Professor at International Institute for Higher Education Research and Capacity Building (IIHEd), O.P. Jindal Global University. Views are personal.