Every nation reveals its idea of justice in how it tests its children. Long before they enter a courtroom or a legislature, students experience what fairness feels like through the exams that decide their futures. If a system rewards privilege as talent and fluency as intelligence, it does not merely measure aptitude; it teaches inequality.
On October 15, 2025, the Consortium of National Law Universities announced a plan to reform the Common Law Admission Test. At its fourth Advisory Board Meeting, chaired by Justice Indu Malhotra, the Consortium decided to form a Committee of Independent Academic Experts to recommend medium- and long-term reforms to be implemented from 2027.
The committee includes five distinguished professors from Oxford, LSE, Cambridge, Columbia, and BML Munjal University. Its terms of reference cover four areas: the quality of questions, the structure of the paper, the syllabus, and a review of comparable international entrance examinations such as the LSAT and LNAT. Public feedback has been invited through a Google Form that will remain open till November 4, 2025.
CLAT, regarded as the gateway to India's top law universities, is more than a competitive exam. It decides who gets to study the law, who learns to interpret it, and ultimately, who participates in shaping its future. The announcement of reform has been widely welcomed, but the process through which it has begun already reveals the inequities that have long shaped the test. The feedback form is only available in English and can be submitted only online. This immediately excludes many students from government and regional-language schools, those with disabilities, and those without access to or familiarity with technologies. Reform has begun by inviting only those who already belong to the narrow circle that benefits from the existing structure. Change that begins with exclusion rarely ends in inclusion.
Representation and reality
The composition of the expert committee reflects a certain distance between academic vision and social reality. Four of its five members teach in foreign universities. They bring immense academic stature and global perspective, yet their daily experience of education takes place in systems that are uniform, well-resourced, and linguistically homogeneous. India's classrooms could not be more different.
Here, the quality of schooling varies widely across regions, income groups, and languages. A student studying in a small-town government school has a completely different relationship with learning compared to a student in an urban private school. One learns to translate knowledge through textbooks that may be outdated; the other engages with ideas through digital tools and international content. These disparities do not simply shape performance; they shape confidence, curiosity, and self-belief. A national entrance test that claims to measure reasoning must begin by recognising that reasoning is built on opportunity.
Reform therefore needs voices that understand the classroom realities of young learners. Schoolteachers, educators from rural and government institutions, special educators, and experts in inclusive education must all be part of this conversation. Without their insight, reform risks becoming a technical exercise in test design rather than a moral and social project in equality.
Merit or advantage?
CLAT has often been described as a test of merit and aptitude. Yet in practice, it functions as a mirror of social advantage. The IDIA Diversity Survey for 2020–21 shows that fewer than four percent of National Law University students came from rural schools and only three percent from vernacular mediums. More than eighty percent attended paid coaching centres, and over half belonged to families earning more than ten lakh rupees a year. Students from the Muslim community made up just three percent of total enrolment, compared to their fourteen-percent share of the population.
These numbers tell a story of structural exclusion. The design of CLAT, with its long passages from English newspapers and academic essays, rewards fluency in a language that many students never encounter outside their classrooms. Its logic and comprehension sections assume comfort with abstract text and quick interpretation. For those who studied in regional languages, every sentence becomes an act of translation, every question a reminder of distance.
What is being measured, then, is not only reasoning but familiarity with a particular cultural and linguistic world. The students who succeed are not necessarily smarter; they are often better prepared by virtue of exposure and environment. When a test privileges such preparation, it cannot be described as a neutral measure of merit. It becomes a reflection of accumulated privilege.
The impact of this bias extends beyond the exam itself. The National Law Universities, conceived as institutions to democratise legal education, now largely reflect the social composition of India's elite. They produce lawyers who are technically competent but often detached from the linguistic and cultural contexts in which most of us live. The idea of justice, when learned in isolation from diversity, risks becoming a language of power rather than empathy.
Language as the first barrier
Language has always been a gatekeeper in Indian education. English, while opening doors to opportunity, also defines who can walk through them. By keeping CLAT entirely in English, the Consortium has turned this social reality into an institutional rule. The Delhi High Court has already cautioned that English-only competitive exams may violate the principle of equal opportunity. That warning speaks directly to the present debate.
Legal education cannot remain blind to our multilingual character. Courts across the country function in regional languages, and lawyers routinely translate between the law's English vocabulary and the client's everyday speech. If entry into this profession depends solely on one language, we will continue to exclude those who understand justice but express it differently. A truly national exam should be accessible in multiple languages. It should test reasoning and judgment, not reading speed or accent. The law gains its legitimacy from the people; its education must do the same.
Pursuing law
Reforming CLAT is not simply about redesigning an exam; it is about reimagining what kind of student we want in our law schools. Law is not only about argument and logic. It is about sensitivity to difference and the ability to understand how rules affect real lives. A student who has grown up navigating translation, scarcity, and social complexity may lack fluency but possess insight. That insight is invaluable to the study and practice of law.
If CLAT continues to favour only those trained in elite English-medium environments, the legal profession will become even more insulated from the realities it is meant to serve. We need lawyers who can read both the Constitution and the society it governs. The entrance process should therefore be designed to find students who combine intellect with curiosity and empathy. That requires a broader definition of excellence, one that recognises not only what a student knows but also what they have overcome to learn it.
From selection to inclusion
True reform will require the Consortium to go beyond procedural changes and invest in structural inclusion. The exam should gradually move towards bilingual or multilingual formats, beginning with Hindi and English. Passages could draw from civic and constitutional debates, social issues, and public reasoning rather than dense academic writing. The goal should be to assess comprehension and moral judgment, not the mastery of a particular style of English prose.
Equally important is the need for outreach. The National Law Universities should actively identify and mentor students from underrepresented schools through reading groups, preparatory workshops, and some kind of courses. Law schools must be prepared to support such students after admission through academic assistance, writing labs, and language support programmes. Accessibility for students with disabilities must also be built into every stage of the process. Inclusion is not charity; it is justice applied to education.
The law's first lesson
CLAT is more than an examination. It is the first interaction that young citizens have with the idea of the law as a system of fairness. Those who pass through it will one day interpret rights, frame policies, and represent clients who may never have heard of this test. If the path to law school remains open only to those already advantaged, the legal system will continue to speak in an accent the majority cannot understand.
The Consortium now stands at a moment of choice. It can design an exam that looks outward to international standards, or it can create one that looks inward to India's diversity. True reform will not be measured by the sophistication of question papers but by the inclusiveness of those who answer them. The law's first lesson is fairness. CLAT must learn to teach it by ensuring that every student, regardless of language, income, or geography, has an equal chance to imagine a future in law.
Views expressed here are personal. The authors are academic lawyers with postgraduate specialisation in Public Law from NALSAR University of Law, Hyderabad.