Modelling it upon LSAT and LNAT will mean greater stress on logical reasoning and English.

https://www.barandbench.com/news/lawschools/nlu-consortium-expert-committee-invites-public-comments-for-clat-2027

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScs9XM-8hTp9j7nXpk9Z3CaHRFY1eNXuJYgFpQoKhonH6pT_A/viewform

1. Great move, absolutely should be done.

2. This is not as "huge" as you seem to think it is. Somesh Taori, the guy who left NLSIU BALLB for Oxford BA in Jurisprudence a couple of years ago, said that CLAT preparation was useful for his LNAT preparation. So there are already some encouraging potential signs and similarities that can be built upon.

3. Therefore, the correct adjective (or descriptive phrase) might be "hugely encouraging".

4. My personal suggestions:

(a) Absolutely model the CLAT on the foreign tests mentioned. Perhaps the LNAT more than the LSAT, because the LSAT has been known to have issues in terms of disability unfriendlyness - being potentially disproportionately bad for blind test takers.

(b) Abolish the PG CLAT. Stupid exam. No credible country in the world I know of recruits to master's type degrees with a generic admission test like CLAT. Undergraduate performance and CV material is a far better indicator, IMV.

This is such an unhelpful and disappointing argument, repeated unthinkingly by so-called fighters for social justice.

1. The law field in India and in most other common law countries operates in English, to a great extent. Yes, there are niches for local language work like in local state district courts etc, but English is still very much needed. We aren't like Canada, where English and French are both official languages. Due to our cultural setup, we cannot have an Indian language declared as an official language or given official language status equivalent to French in Canada. Therefore, we need to follow Lee Kuan Yew's example in Singapore and increase, not decrease, the prominence given to English, especially for aspiring lawyers.

2. Therefore, it is the on-the-ground reality that applicants to read law at university are facing. These are, as far as learning the English language or dealing with English is concerned, pretty shitty. Most students with school-leaving qualifications from Indian exam boards do not know how to structure, let alone write, an essay, construct a coherent argument, conduct a rigorous literary analysis... none of the techniques and skills in the social sciences and humanities that good educational systems consider necessary. A similar story applies to the sciences to the extent that students learn them at school, or why would the JEE curriculum be considered as advanced even compared to school? An Indian school-level history student, if given a proposition like factor x was more important to the rise to power of Hitler than factor y would, even if she had learned about Weimar Germany and the Nazi regime in the class, not be able to come up with a very good response, either in favour of, or against, such a proposition, because the buck stops at memorising the facts, rather than teaching people what to do with them! We all know this: school-level English literature and/or history exams look much more like comprehension/tasks of simple fact regurgitation, than any level of critical thinking or analysis. Such a thing should be within the capability of a five-year-old (and AI), not an 18-year-old! The School Review Commission for NLSIU, composed of three of the world's foremost legal academics, pointed this out in their report as a difficulty NLS is facing - with students of certain backgrounds having to be taught essay writing from the ground up, whereas those from others, very simply, don't. Change this reality first, and then we'll be in a far better position.

3. One way to pressure exam boards to change is for universities to play hardball. For a good university like a top five NLU to be brave enough to stand up in front of them and say, "Yo mate, your standards are fucked up, so I am re-designing the playing-field" would be the principled thing to do. When the exam boards feel the pressure that the good universities in our own country are operating at a level we aren't preparing the students for, that's when, IMV, things will begin to change. You can have as many students as you want going to foreign universities at postgrad or, nowadays, even undergrad, and then saying that school educational standards in our country for humanities and social sciences are, to an extent, at the bottom of the drain. However, that ain't gonna influence nobody, until we start operating like the systems we want to get ahead of.

1. I am sorry, you were using LSAT-India and not the LSAT U.S. The hard reality is that the two are very different exams, with the LSAT U.S. being much, much harder. You have a huge image problem because of your mind-blowing batch sizes ▮▮▮.

2. LNAT? There is still a lot that one can be critical of, as regards that: you don't give a benchmark of what kinds of scores you typically would want to see. And, unlike the British universities, you don't have a school board exams filter either, going with the 45% standard (as far as I remember) that other unis in India go with. Set the equivalent of an A Levels A* AA, which is a King's/UCL/LSE-kind of standard requirement, and the conversations will be very different among all but the most diehard haters (whose minds can anyway not be changed).

Absolutely well said. In case you are downvoted by the LI leftist crowd, I just wanna say you are 100% spot on. Like you said, we need to emulate Lee Kuan Yew. You need to have a strong command of English to understand judgments and textbooks. No two ways about it. Please stop this nonsense about teaching in Hindi. How the F are you going to teach taxation, arbitration, international law, Patents Act etc in Hindi?? These SJW people on LI turn every damn thing into a woke culture war, dropping words like "elitist", "savarna privilege" etc.

Thanks. Your point is also a very good one: you can't teach some very important things without knowing English. Eliav Lieblich, a prominent international law scholar, specifically says that if you don't know English or French properly, doing research in international law will be tough - he says that openly in a paper called 'Doing Research in International Law', published in the Harvard Journal of International Law. What do the ones who employ these slogans want: Indian lawyers no longer having the capability to practice or research international law!?

I completely agree with your statement about that we as a count must emulate Lee Kuan Yew but it could have been said without the random and out of place bashing of the left. Cause most leftist would probably agree on this.
Anyway, There is no way we can get all of our people with such diversity to agree on one Indian Language. And the amount of time that has been wasted on it, and keep on wasting in this is very unfortunate.

Your argument makes several valid and necessary points. It is indeed true that the language of the law in India is overwhelmingly English. It is also true that English proficiency, particularly the ability to think, argue, and write in English, is an indispensable professional skill for law graduates who wish to operate in the higher judiciary, in corporate law, in policy, or in academia. The deficiencies in Indian school-level education, especially in the humanities and social sciences are real and deeply entrenched. Rote memorization, poor training in analytical writing, and limited exposure to rigorous argumentation have long been endemic features of the system. The consequences of these failings are not abstract and even India’s best universities spend valuable time teaching students how to write coherent paragraphs, rather than training them to produce original scholarship or sophisticated legal argument.

However, it is crucial to locate this problem within its proper socio-economic context. The root issue is not that Indian students as such are incapable of analytical or linguistic sophistication, but that the Indian education system is profoundly unequal. Access to quality English medium education is overwhelmingly determined by parental income. What we often label as "merit" in competitive exams is, in practice, a proxy for privilege - the ability to afford the kind of schooling and extra coaching that cultivates English fluency and critical thinking. The system, therefore, rewards those who already start from an advantaged position and excludes many intellectually capable students whose families simply cannot buy entry into that world.

This inequality becomes self-reinforcing. The "meritorious" cohort appears large because India’s population is large, but it is drawn from a narrow and socio-economically homogenous band. The educational system then designs its "standards" around this band, mistaking privilege for preparedness and replicating the same elite bias at every level - from school curricula to university admissions to professional hierarchies. In such a context, to make English proficiency a decisive gatekeeping criterion without parallel investment in equitable access to English education is, effectively, to lock the gates further.

You are right that universities must "play hardball", but the battle should be fought on two fronts. One is the demand for academic rigor, which must not be compromised. The other, equally important, is the demand for structural fairness: that rigor should not be defined solely by the cultural capital of the elite. The challenge is not to abandon English, but to democratize access to it. That means pushing for systemic reforms- teacher training, curriculum redesign, early exposure to multilingual and critical pedagogy -rather than assuming that raising the linguistic bar alone will somehow lift standards.

And ultimately, this is not just a technical or policy question - it is a value choice. We must decide whether our legal education system exists to reproduce the social elite, or to identify and nurture potential wherever it resides. Upholding English proficiency as the gatekeeper of legal merit may serve the former goal, but it undermines the latter. The values that guide our admissions, curricula, and institutional practices reveal what we believe the law itself should stand for: access, fairness, and justice or exclusion dressed up as excellence.

Until the foundational inequities in schooling are addressed, “merit” will remain a distorted mirror: it will reflect privilege more faithfully than potential. The goal, therefore, should not be to dilute standards, but to expand genuine opportunity to ensure that the next generation of bright legal minds is drawn not only from the children of the upper middle class, but also from the vast reservoir of talent our current system leaves behind.