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.
Now contrast that with the journey of a student who enters a traditional law college, perhaps at a Central or state university. This student may have studied in a government school with broken infrastructure, worked part-time to support their family, and walked into law with little guidance, few connections, and no margin for error. They read the same Constitution. They pass the same bar. They often outperform their peers in real-life resilience. But the legal world does not reward resilience. It rewards reputation, and reputation is monopolised by pedigree.
When both these students step into the legal market, it is not knowledge that differentiates them, but taglines: the name of the university, the internships completed, the comfort with polished English, the ease with urban codes of behaviour. One is called “promising.” The other is “raw.” One is absorbed into the circuit of clerkships and foreign LLMs. The other is asked to prove their worth again and again, and still might not be seen.
This is the reality that Chief Justice Gavai was pointing to. His warning about students taking massive loans to pursue foreign LLMs was not about ambition, but rather about access. It was about how some students can fund dreams while others are asked to mortgage their futures just to keep up. When a privileged student spends lakhs on an elite law school and more on a foreign degree, it is seen as investment. When a Dalit or EWS student does the same, it becomes a risk. This is not just a matter of economics. It is a matter of caste, of history, and of how we have built the legal profession to look like it is open to all, while silently closing doors for most.
Justice Gavai also hinted at something else that few in his position ever do: why young law graduates from marginalised backgrounds are turning away from litigation. It is not because they lack commitment or capacity, but because the path is stacked against them. Unlike corporate jobs, litigation does not offer income security in the early years. It often requires unpaid work, social networking, and survival in elite spaces that were never built with them in mind. For someone whose family depends on their earnings, this is not an option; it is a trap.
We often lament that not enough bright minds enter litigation. But we rarely ask why we’ve made it so difficult for them to survive if they do. The answer, again, lies in a structure that assumes a cushion of privilege. It assumes that early-career lawyers can afford to wait, to network, to impress. It assumes they have someone to fall back on. That assumption alone excludes thousands of brilliant legal minds before they even begin.
And this exclusion is not just a personal loss. It is a constitutional failure. Because if our legal system only works for those who were born into access, then the idea of justice becomes hollow. It means that the very people the Constitution was supposed to empower — those at the margins —are shut out of the system meant to defend their rights. If the legal fraternity is composed largely of those who have never experienced exclusion, how can it ever be expected to dismantle it?
The most painful part of this is how silently it all happens. There is no open discrimination. No explicit rejection. Instead, there is a quiet sorting mechanism built into our institutions: who gets the call-back, who gets the scholarship, who is considered articulate, who gets invited to speak, who gets hired? We call it merit. We celebrate it. But we never stop to ask: on whose terms is this merit being accorded?
What CJI Gavai’s speech does, without fanfare, or confrontation, is engage with that silence. It reminds us that the promise of equality cannot be separated from the question of access. It reminds us that opportunity is not just about being allowed in. It is also about being able to stay, to succeed, to be recognised. And it reminds us that the law, which claims to speak for everyone, often forgets to listen to those who have had to fight just to arrive at the table.
If we take his words seriously, the implications are wide-reaching. We need to rethink how we measure merit, how we structure admissions, how we fund legal education, and how we support those who enter it from outside traditional power structures. We need to invest in state universities, end the culture of unpaid internships, expand fellowships for litigation, and reframe what it means to be “qualified.” But most of all, we need to stop pretending that law schools and legal careers are neutral spaces. They are not. They carry forward the inequalities of the society they emerge from unless we make a deliberate effort to disrupt that pattern.
Chief Justice Gavai did not raise his voice. He did not make grand declarations. He simply said what needed to be said. And for a moment, the mask slipped. In a legal ecosystem that has learned to clothe privilege in the language of fairness, that one moment of honesty should not go unnoticed.
Because in a system built on silence, even a whisper of truth can be transformative.