Legal education and professional regulation are often treated as internal concerns of the Bar. They should instead be understood as part of the architecture of justice. Courts do not deliver justice through judges, statutes and procedure alone. They also depend on the quality of advocacy placed before them. Lawyers shape facts, frame legal questions, advise litigants, draft pleadings and assist courts in interpreting and applying the law. The Bar is therefore not external to the justice system; it is one of its constitutive institutions.
The standards by which lawyers are educated, licensed, trained and disciplined have consequences far beyond the profession itself. Where law schools are uneven, entry filters are weak, apprenticeship is informal and disciplinary mechanisms lack credibility, the injury is ultimately public. It is felt by underprepared litigants, overburdened courts and a justice system already struggling with delay and distrust.
The central premise of reform must therefore be clear: the competence and ethics of lawyers are not private attributes of professionals. They are public conditions for the rule of law.
India has one of the largest legal professions in the world. The Ministry of Law and Justice informed Parliament that 20,13,081 advocates were enrolled with different State Bar Councils as of 2023. A large Bar is not, by itself, a weakness. A country of India’s size needs lawyers in district courts, legal aid institutions, tribunals, regulatory bodies, universities, civil society organisations, public institutions and commercial practice. The difficulty is that expansion has not been matched by a credible system of quality assurance, professional training and accountability.
The crisis, therefore, is not simply that some lawyers may lack genuine degrees, or that some law colleges may be weak, or that disciplinary bodies may move slowly. The deeper crisis is institutional. India has expanded access to the legal profession without building a matching architecture of verification, training, ethical supervision and public accountability.
The Fake-Degree Controversy and the Crisis of Verification
The recent controversy over fake law degrees has brought this anxiety into sharp public focus. In May 2026, a Bench headed by Chief Justice of India Surya Kant reportedly expressed serious concern over persons wearing black robes despite doubts about their degrees and orally observed that the CBI should look into the matter.
The concern was reinforced by Bar Council of India Chairperson Manan Kumar Mishra, who reportedly stated that 35-40% of advocates may be practising with fake law degrees, linking this concern partly to the non-submission of verification forms by a large number of advocates during the degree-verification process.
This claim requires caution. Non-submission of a verification form cannot automatically be equated with fraud. Suspicion is not proof. Administrative delay, poor communication, negligence or bureaucratic inertia may also explain non-compliance in many cases. It would be unfair and dangerous to treat every non-verified advocate as an impostor.
The real problem is different, and more serious. The system appears unable to distinguish quickly and credibly between genuine advocates, negligent non-compliers and possible frauds. That failure damages everyone: litigants who need trustworthy representation, courts that depend on qualified officers, and honest lawyers whose profession is diminished by uncertainty.
Where forged degrees, organised rackets or collusion in enrolment are suspected, an independent and time-bound investigation, including by the CBI in appropriate cases, would not be excessive. It would be necessary institutional repair. The question is not only whether some individuals forged degrees. The deeper question is whether law colleges, universities, State Bar Councils and the Bar Council of India have the capacity to verify credentials, detect fraud, discipline misconduct and protect courts from impostors.
Uneven Legal Education and Regulatory Overload
The roots of the problem lie in the uneven quality of legal education. India has produced outstanding lawyers from National Law Universities, older university departments, government law colleges and many non-elite institutions. Excellence in Indian law has never belonged to elite campuses alone. But the broader ecosystem remains deeply uneven.
Some law colleges appear to exist only formally, issuing degrees without meaningful learning or quality assurance. Others function with inadequate faculty, weak libraries, poor clinical training, irregular teaching, little exposure to drafting or advocacy, and a limited research culture. The result is a professional pipeline in which the possession of a degree does not always guarantee professional readiness.
The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Personnel, Public Grievances, Law and Justice, in its 2024 report on strengthening legal education, noted that inefficiency and inadequacy in the inspection process had contributed to the recognition of substandard law colleges. It recommended that quality should prevail over quantity and that effective steps should be taken to curb the mushrooming of weak law colleges.
The Committee also made an important institutional recommendation. It suggested that the Bar Council of India’s role should be limited mainly to regulating basic eligibility for practice at the Bar, while broader legal education should be entrusted to an independent authority. It proposed the creation of a National Council for Legal Education and Research under the proposed Higher Education Commission of India.
That recommendation deserves serious consideration. The same body cannot effectively represent advocates, regulate advocates, inspect law colleges, prescribe curricula, conduct licensing examinations, verify degrees and discipline misconduct at a national scale without institutional overload and possible conflicts of interest.
Legal education today is not only about producing courtroom lawyers. It must prepare students for litigation, research, regulation, arbitration, legal aid, technology, governance, public policy and rights-based work. That requires an education regulator with academic depth, professional credibility and operational independence.
A Weak Entry Filter into a Powerful Profession
The present entry filter into the profession also needs reform. The All India Bar Examination was introduced to ensure a minimum level of competence before an advocate is allowed to practise. In Bar Council of India v Bonnie Foi Law College, the Supreme Court upheld the Bar Council’s power to conduct the AIBE and recognised the need for a qualifying examination linked to the right to practise.
The problem is not that the AIBE has a high pass percentage. A licensing examination need not be designed to fail candidates. A high success rate is not inherently suspicious if the examination properly tests professional readiness. The more important question is what the examination measures.
The official AIBE-XX press release states that 2,51,968 candidates appeared and 1,74,386 qualified, resulting in an overall pass percentage of 69.21%. That figure, by itself, does not prove weakness. But it does invite scrutiny of the examination’s design.
[Aftab Mohammad is a lawyer and a senior public policy and governance specialist. He writes on diplomacy, history, democracy, and contemporary questions of law and justice.]