The Supreme Court on Friday (August 21), by a 2:1 majority, retained its 2025 decision requiring prior professional exposure before entry into the subordinate judiciary but significantly altered how that requirement would operate.

While the court declined to revisit its fundamental conclusion that future judges should have some familiarity with the functioning of courts, it held that such exposure need not come explicitly from practice at the Bar and included a year of judicial academic training and one year of supervised clerkship instead.

The bench comprising Chief Justice of India Surya Kant and Justice A G Masih gave the majority, saying that “a judicial service which demands adequate maturity and practical exposure must also remain sufficiently attractive to the most capable young lawyers” warning that overly burdensome entry requirements could discourage precisely the candidates the rule seeks to attract.

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In his dissenting opinion, Justice K Vinod Chandran said that the original three-year practice at the Bar requirement should remain untouched. In his view, law graduates “steeped in academics” should first have “a feel of the affairs of man and the travails of a litigant before deciding their destinies”.

The rule before 2002

Most states required a minimum three years of practice as a lawyer before they could sit for the examination for the Civil Judge (Junior Division) entry-level post in the district judiciary.

In 1993, the Supreme Court made this requirement uniform across the country and held that “the recruitment of law graduates as judicial officers without any training or background of lawyering has not proved to be a successful experiment,” and said that “neither knowledge derived from books nor pre-service training can be an adequate substitute for the first-hand experience of the working of the court-system”.

The Shetty Commission report 

That rule eventually changed after the formation of the Shetty Commission under the chairmanship of Justice K J Shetty, which was primarily constituted to examine pay and service conditions in the subordinate judiciary but was also asked to review how judges are recruited, including the qualifications that were required to enter judicial service.

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The commission eventually said that the students graduating from law schools were already exposed to courts through internships and clinical training. It said, “It would be, therefore, futile to prescribe three years practice as an advocate to have intimate knowledge of the Court work as a condition for recruitment.”

The Supreme Court accepted their recommendation in 2002 and did away with the three-year practice requirement, allowing fresh law grads to enter the judicial service examination process immediately after graduation. 

The 2025 order

However, in May 2025, the Court reversed course, saying that “for the last 20 years during which the recruitment of fresh law graduates as judicial officers without a single day of practice at the Bar has been permitted, the said endeavour has not been a successful experience”.

Restoring the requirement, the court said that the candidates must have three years of relevant experience before appearing for the judicial service exam. This period would be counted from the date they enrol with the State Bar Council, and time spent working as a law clerk with judges could also be counted towards this requirement. It directed that successful candidates undergo at least one year of training before assuming a regular judicial post.

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The ruling drew immediate review petitions. Petitioners argued the court had relied on affidavits favouring the rule while giving less weight to states that opposed it and that the judgement cited no empirical evidence that fresh graduates perform worse as judges.

A broader argument about fairness was that two decades of law students had planned their careers on the assumption that the exam would be open immediately after graduation, and the sudden reintroduction of a waiting period upended that. 

The 2026 order

The Supreme Court retained its central conclusion that law grads should have some exposure to the functioning of courts before entering judicial services. It said a civil judge, from the first day on the bench, deals with questions involving “life, liberty, property and personal rights”. Exposure to courts before taking up that role helps develop “judicial temperament, patience, empathy, courtroom discipline and an appreciation of the respective roles of the Bench and the Bar”.

The court also recognised that the path to establishing oneself at the Bar is not the same for everyone. It observed that women candidates may face social and familial constraints during this period, while persons with disabilities may encounter difficulties in obtaining meaningful practice opportunities. However, it stopped short of creating separate eligibility standards for different categories of candidates. 

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Saying that practical exposure can be acquired through “a combination of professional and institutional experience” including judicial training and supervised clerkships, it changed how the requirement would operate.

For those in the transition period — that is, from May 20, 2025 to March 31, 2027 — the graduates would be deemed to have completed one year of practice without needing a certificate. Candidates selected during this period will then undergo one year of training as a “training judicial officer” at the State Judicial Academy and one year of supervised clerkship, both of which will count towards the three-year requirement.

From April 2027 onwards, candidates must have at least one year of actual practice before appearing for examination, certified under a mechanism that is prescribed by the High Courts. Even then, the successful candidates must complete the same one-year academy training and one-year clerkship programme before taking up regular judicial duties.

The court also rejected counting postgraduate education towards the requirement, saying that academic study cannot substitute for familiarity with the functioning of courts. It directed that the new framework will operate for five years after which its effectiveness will be reviewed.

Dissenting opinion

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Cautioning against the creation of “a cadre of careerists rather than jurists capable of enriching a robust system”, Justice Chandran disagreed with the majority’s decision to count academy training and clerkship as a substitute for part of the practice requirement. While agreeing that courtroom exposure before joining the judiciary is necessary, he said that the 2025 order ought to remain unchanged.

Rejecting comparisons with other government services, he said judicial officers occupy a distinct position because they exercise independent decision-making from the day they take office. He said that there can be no equation to public services, as judicial decisions are insulated from administrative supervision and can only be corrected through appeals or revisions.

He also rejected the argument that young lawyers gain little from their initial years at the Bar because they are rarely entrusted with briefs or arguments. “When a senior lawyer or litigant would not entrust a case to a lawyer who is fresh out of college, will it be safe to entrust such persons with the decision-making process in a case?” he wrote.

He said that professional judgement develops through lived experiences, and “training schedules” cannot give a jurist “the feel of life and its worries, throbbing in every brief”.