TENS OF THOUSANDS OF LAW ASPIRANTS across India find themselves trapped in a web of institutional apathy, policy paralysis and systemic dysfunction. From the Common Law Admission Test (‘CLAT’) 2025 debacle to indefinitely postponed judicial service exams and a worsening judicial vacancy crisis, the picture is grim. At the heart of this turmoil lies a generation of young legal minds - demoralized, underemployed, and dangerously disillusioned.
The CLAT, conceived as the national gateway to India’s prestigious National Law Universities, is supposed to usher in the country’s future legal leadership. Instead, it has become a glaring example of administrative failure. CLAT 2025, held in December 2024, saw results declared too swiftly, only to reveal errors in answer keys, ambiguous questions, and procedural lapses. Petitions challenging these results followed. In April 2025, the Delhi High Court ordered the Consortium of NLUs to revise the results. The judgement is pending at the Supreme Court, freezing the revised scores and halting admission counselling to NLUs. The bench observed:
"At the outset, we must express our anguish at the casual manner in which the Consortium has been framing the questions for the CLAT examination, which involves the career aspirations of lakhs of students in the country."
Thousands of deserving students who spent years preparing are now left in limbo, their academic futures paused and mental health strained. This is no isolated incident. CLAT has faltered repeatedly - pandemic delays and flawed online formats in 2020, confusing reschedules in 2021, and answer key errors in 2022 and 2023. For an exam meant to select the nation’s future legal thinkers, such recurring mismanagement is not just unfortunate, it is a disgrace.
