When Chief Justice Surya Kant led 3 judges bench, which delivered the Supreme Court’s verdict in Bhumika Trust v. Union of India (2026 INSC 904) on August 21, cutting the mandatory Bar-practice period for Civil Judge (Junior Division) from three years to one, he closed one debate and reopened another. The Court rejected the plea that a postgraduate law degree be treated as equivalent to Bar practice. A degree, it held, is not a courtroom. Fair enough. But the reasoning, here and in the parent judgments, All India Judicial Association cases, which is commonly referred to as the Second AIJA (1989), Third AIJA (2004), and the recent one in 2025, rests on an asymmetry Indian constitutional law has never confronted: the same Constitution that keeps a law professor off the district court bench invites her, by name, onto the Supreme Court’s.
Article 124(3)(c) provides that a person is qualified for appointment as a Supreme Court judge if, in the President’s opinion, they are “a distinguished jurist”; no Bar enrolment, no litigation, no courtroom apprenticeship required. Article 217(2)(c) repeats this for High Court judges. Though the Constitution provides such space, it has evidently become a dead letter. Appointment of academicians without any litigation/bar experience in the judiciary is not a novel or unique idea, but something which is practised across the globe. Professor Felix Frankfurter, a Harvard Law Professor for 25 years, was appointed as the US Supreme Court Associate Justice by President Roosevelt; Prof. Andreas Voßkuhle of Freiburg University was appointed as a judge at the Bundesverfassungsgericht (German Federal Constitutional Court); Prof. Akua Kuenyehia, Judge at the International Criminal Court, was a Professor at the University of Ghana with no litigation experience, etc. If, as Justice K. Vinod Chandran put it in dissent, the courtroom is “the most profound of all classrooms” and nothing else will do, these appointments should have failed. They did not. India’s own Article 124(3)(c) has never been used. Not one appointment, in seventy-five years, has come through the “distinguished jurist” route.
Justice Chandran’s dissent deserves engagement, not dismissal. His concern that diluting the practice requirement will produce “a cadre of careerists rather than of jurists” is not unreasonable; years at the Bar cultivate a temperament a classroom does not, by itself, replicate. But the dissent assumes something the record does not bear out: that a fresh graduate can “go and practise” while preparing, in parallel, for a three-stage exam. The Bar Council of India’s circular of October 15, 2024, issued after a Delhi High Court direction, is instructive. It recommends, without binding force, a minimum monthly stipend of ₹20,000 for junior advocates in urban India and ₹15,000 in rural India, payable for at least three years, subject to the paying capacity of the counsel or the firm. In contrast, as per Delhi’s own Minimum Wages Notification, a graduate labourer in Delhi is statutorily entitled to ₹24,356, and a non-matriculate labourer is entitled to ₹20,371. In comparison, a law graduate (in some case Postgraduates), who are expected to provide Judges to this country, are being offered less than the Minimum Wage, in litigation by their seniors, who in turn can ignore this whole BCI direction.
If the Constitution is prepared to hold, through Articles 124(3)(c) and 217(2)(c), that a professor’s chair is a legitimate route to the highest bench, it cannot treat the hardship at the lower rung as someone else’s problem. A Court entertaining such a lofty idea for itself owes equal seriousness to the entry point it insists upon for everyone else. Making the BCI’s stipend recommendation statutorily binding, pegged to the applicable state minimum wage, would be a modest, overdue start.
It is against this backdrop that the trajectory of many law graduates deserves attention. A considerable number pursue a postgraduate degree specifically to qualify for the UGC-NET, to become eligible for teaching. This is not to say academia is easier, or that the two can be equated; teaching carries its own demands of scholarship, administration, and mentorship. Years instructing students in procedure, evidence, contract, and constitutional law require repeated, rigorous re-examination of each subject. This is not a claim that teaching substitutes for advocacy; it is the narrower claim that such a person’s eligibility for judicial service is not indefensible, particularly where the Constitution already treats comparable scholarly distinction as sufficient, alone, for its highest courts.
Justice Chandran is right that no training capsule substitutes wholesale for years at the Bar. But the framework has not asked whether academic training, combined with disciplined engagement with the law, might supply a different, not lesser, readiness one the Constitution itself already treats as sufficient for its highest bench. Nor has it addressed the fact that the alternative route it prescribes remains, by the state’s own admission, financially unworkable for most aspirants. Until both are examined on merit, no distinguished jurist will ever find a seat on our constitutional courts, nor will we develop the maturity to give an academician a chance at the ground level, and everything at every level will remain unfulfilled, top and bottom alike.
Shashank Maheshwari is an Assistant Professor at Jindal Global Law School, O.P. Jindal Global University.
