WHEN CHIEF JUSTICE B.R. GAVAI stood before graduating students at NALSAR and told them not to pursue a foreign LLM by taking on a ₹60-lakh loan, it may have sounded to some only as a cautious financial advice. But for those of us who have lived the realities he was alluding to, his words were far more powerful. In a brief remark, he punctured a carefully preserved illusion: that legal education in India is a neutral, merit-based ladder open equally to all. It is not. It never was.
Coming from any judge, the remark might have passed without much attention. But Justice Gavai is not just any judge. He is only the second Dalit Chief Justice of India in the republic’s history, someone who has not theorised caste from a distance, but lived its everyday truths.
His presence in that hallroom, and in that office, carries weight beyond formality. And what he said in that moment was not just about foreign degrees or debt, it was a quiet but forceful indictment of the systemic inequalities that define who gets to thrive in India’s legal profession and who gets left behind.
This country loves to speak of equality, particularly in legal spaces. We build speeches and judgments around it. We quote the Preamble, cite Article 14, and invoke the Constitution as a grand leveller. But we rarely stop to ask who actually gets to access the promise that equality holds. We are less comfortable with that question because the answer often points straight back at us.
The reality is this: merit is not evenly distributed because access never was. The legal education system in India is built on a hidden scaffolding of caste, class, language, and inherited privilege. National Law Universities (‘NLUs’), often seen as the pinnacle of legal training, admit only a narrow sliver of India’s population; those who can afford elite coaching, English fluency, and years of academic grooming. Their fees, grossing around Rs 15 lakhs in total nowadays, are unaffordable for many. Their culture is alienating to most. And their graduates- almost by design, end up with disproportionate access to law firms, judicial clerkships, and postgraduate scholarships.
