NALSAR tiff only latest in long history of conflict between BCI and law students

The recent controversy over Bar Council of India’s (BCI) chairperson, Manan Kumar Mishra, ordering that the outgoing batch of National Academy of Legal Studies and Research (NALSAR) University, Hyderabad, students be prevented from enrolling as advocates in State Bar Councils has drawn attention to the adversarial relationship between law students and BCI over the years.

A Bench led by the Chief Justice of India Surya Kant ruled that the BCI has no power to “take disciplinary action against a law student” and noted that the BCI may prescribe and enforce standards of legal education, but its functional role comes in only after law students graduate and register as advocates.

It seems like a tidy end to an untidy story that has been almost six decades in the making. This was not the first time the Bar Council has been questioned about the scope and limits of its power to regulate the lives of law students who were not, strictly speaking, its business yet.

The BCI was created by the Advocates Act of 1961 with two primary, connected purposes: to lay down standards for those who get to practise law in India, and to lay down standards for the institutions that provide legal education for these future practitioners.

But when the question turns to the conduct of students, the waters grow murky. For decades, the authority has found itself at loggerheads with certain peculiar student interests. Some of the earliest disputes revolved around the validity and recognition of law degrees, the qualifications required, and the competence needed to enter into the profession.

A pre-enrolment training requirement was built into the original 1961 framework for enrolment as an advocate, but the relevant provisions were removed in 1973 through a legislative amendment. The BCI tried to revive pre-enrolment training in 1998, but the Supreme Court struck it down in the subsequent year, holding that the BCI lacked statutory authority to reintroduce a requirement Parliament had deliberately removed.

In the late 80s and early 90s, the council stressed on the mandate of regular attendance at lectures, tutorials and moot courts. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the BCI moved to phase out evening law courses. The apex court has largely concurred with these requirements as measures intended to preserve the quality and rigour of legal education.

Evening and distance programmes, however, were often viewed as routes into legal education for people who worked during the day. What therefore becomes a recurring theme is that measures intended to improve the quality of legal education have often come at the cost of access.

A decade later, a dispute over the affiliation of a Bhopal law college developed, on the Supreme Court’s own initiative, into a much broader inquiry into the “diminishing standards” of legal education. The solution was seen to be a uniform, nationwide compulsory (bar) examination.

The first All India Bar Examination followed in 2010. The Council described the examination as a mechanism for establishing a basic hygiene-level standard of professional competence. The students, however, saw this as another additional hurdle between their degree and their livelihood.

In Tamil Nadu in 2011, the disagreement became a mass movement with law graduates boycotting the examination, tearing up exam tickets, staging road and rail blockades. Some State Bar Councils also opposed the BCI’s approach, arguing that graduates had already completed council-prescribed legal education over 3 or 5 years.

The Supreme Court has since affirmed the BCI’s power to prescribe an examination before or after enrolment, with students eligible to enter their final semester being permitted to take the AIBE. In 2024, however, the BCI issued a notification excluding final-year students from AIBE XIX, prompting another Supreme Court intervention; the Court ultimately allowed eligible final-year students to take the examination.

In 2013, more than 800 law students petitioned the BCI to create an All India Law Students Grievance Redressal Authority. Their argument was that since the BCI regulated law schools, it should also facilitate a mechanism through which students could escalate grievances concerning inadequate facilities, arbitrary administration and weak student representation.

Recurring issues have also emerged regarding the college administration’s failure of renewal of required BCI recognition. In 2014, the council announced that graduates of Delhi University’s three law centres would not be eligible for enrolment because they had not obtained the necessary extension of the BCI affiliation.

Students, now marked ineligible to enrol as advocates, protested against both the university and the BCI. Similar issues cropped up in 2018 for Rajasthan University when the institution’s BCI recognition lapsed. The affected students went on a hunger strike.

Students of Meerut College also protested in 2017 as a reaction to the college reducing its LL.B intake from 1,140 to 300, with the college attributing the reduction to a BCI directive. The students burned effigies of the college administration.

More recently, in May 2026, students from RML NLU Lucknow protested due to the college’s lack of BCI affiliation. Similar affiliation lapses in 2026 landed GLC Kozhikode in Kerala High Court. Similar issues have surfaced in Mumbai in 2018, Gujarat in 2023, Barabanki, UP in 2025, among several others.

The Courts and the BCI have, in such cases, largely ensured that the interests of students are not jeopardised due to an institute’s dereliction. However, the regulatory clashes do not end there. In 2016, the BCI’s directive to law colleges to prescribe dress codes “befitting the profession” generated criticism from students in Bengaluru, who saw it as unnecessary regimentation.

That same year, students at Delhi University yet again protested the BCI’s recommendation to shut down evening law classes. During the pandemic, students confronted the BCI over...