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On the eve of Teachers’ Day, a law teacher sought justice from the Supreme Court for thousands of students who annually fall victim to the “arbitrary and inefficient” conduct of the Common Law Admission Test (CLAT).
The petition, filed by Shamnad Basheer, a legal academic and scholar in Intellectual Property Rights law, said the CLAT was being increasingly subject to arbitrariness, the questions were plagiarised and sub-standard, and incompetence marked the conduct of the annual test for admission to graduate and post-graduate courses in law.
Admitting the petition, a Bench, led by Justice T.S. Thakur, on Friday issued notice to the Union of India, the Legal Education Committee of the Bar Council of India and the Rajiv Gandhi University in Patiala, where the next CLAT is scheduled for May 2016. The court gave them six weeks to respond.
The first edition of the CLAT was conducted by the National Law School India University, Bengaluru, in May 2008. The scores were used for admission to 11 National Law Schools, including four non-participating universities, for the academic year 2008-09. Since then, the CLAT has been conducted eight times for academic years from 2008-09 to 2015-16.
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