Common Law Admission Test (CLAT) : Way to Legal Education
The concept of National Law Universities to act as a pace-setter and testing ground for bold experiments in legal education came up because the pattern of legal education at traditional Universities was not found to be satisfactory. In course of time, fourteen National Law Universities were established to achieve excellence in legal education. These Universities are national in the sense that substantial number of seats in all these
Universities are filled-up by students from all over India and the academic staffs are also recruited on all India basis. Till 2007 each National Law University conducted tests separately in different Centers spread all over the country and thousands of students after their 10+2 examinations took those multiple admission tests at considerable expense and with lots of inconvenience. In order to avoid the hardship faced by the candidates in appearing in a number of tests for admission to different individual Universities initiative was taken for conducting a Common Law Admission Test (CLAT) for admission to different National Law Universities. However, only eleven out of the fourteen National Law Universities are part of CLAT.