Law & Policy
Three Years, Rearranged: What the Practice Requirement Now Measures
24 August 2026 · 21 min read
On 21 August 2026 the Supreme Court delivered judgment in Bhumika Trust v. Union of India, Writ Petition (Civil) No. 1110 of 2025, and in three review petitions arising out of All India Judges Association v. Union of India, Writ Petition (Civil) No. 1022 of 1989. It was reported almost everywhere in the same words: the three-year practice requirement for entry into the judicial service has been reduced to one year.
That description is not wrong about the number a candidate must satisfy before sitting the examination. It is wrong about what the Court did. The three-year requirement was not reduced. It was rearranged. The figure of three years appears in the operative directions exactly as it did before, and the directions are drafted to satisfy it in full — one year of practice at the Bar, one year of institutional training at a State Judicial Academy, and one year of structured law clerkship, with the second and third each declared "equivalent to one year of practice at the Bar for the purposes of the three-year requirement". The arithmetic is unchanged. What has moved is the point within those three years at which the competitive examination is held.
That distinction is not pedantry. A shorter requirement and a resequenced one produce different institutions. Almost every feature of the new scheme that is difficult — the trainee cadre, the half salary, the evaluation report, the harder certificate — follows from the resequencing and would not follow from a reduction.
What the directions actually say
The scheme is set out in paragraphs 73 and 74 of the majority opinion of Surya Kant, CJI, speaking for himself and Masih, J.
For advertisements issued up to 31 March 2027, all law graduates may apply. Because more than a year has passed since the judgment under review, such candidates "shall, for the purposes of their applications, be deemed to have completed one year of active practice", and need furnish no certificate for that deemed year. On selection they are appointed not as Civil Judges but as "Trainee Judicial Officers". They then undergo one year of intensive training at the State Judicial Academy, and that year "shall be treated as equivalent to one year of practice at the Bar for the purposes of the three-year requirement". They are paid, during it, one-half of the remuneration of a Judicial Magistrate First Class. There follows a further year of law clerkship — six months under a Principal District and Sessions Judge or a member of the Higher Judicial Service, six months under a sitting Judge of the High Court — and that year "shall also be treated as equivalent to one year of practice at the Bar" for the same purpose, on the same half emoluments. At its close the supervising High Court Judge submits a reasoned evaluation report, and only on a satisfactory evaluation does the trainee enter the regular post with the regular pay scale.
For advertisements issued on or after 1 April 2027 the deeming of the first year stops. The candidate must possess "at least one year of actual practice", proved by a Certificate of Practice which "shall not be issued unless the candidate's presence and participation in effective judicial proceedings, whether along with a senior member of the Bar with at least 10 years practice or otherwise, have been duly recorded in accordance with the mechanism to be prescribed by the High Courts". Selection is followed by the same two years of training and clerkship, notwithstanding the prior practice.
Read the two paragraphs together and the structure is plain. The three years remain. One is served before the examination; two are served after appointment. The candidate who under the 2025 judgment would have spent three years at the Bar and then competed now competes after one, and completes the balance inside the institution they have joined.
How the figure got here
The three years is not a number the Court arrived at in 2025. It has been prescribed, withdrawn and prescribed again, and the reasons on each occasion are worth setting beside the present scheme, because the 2026 order resembles an earlier one more closely than it resembles the judgment it modifies.
The requirement was made uniform in All India Judges Association v. Union of India, (1993) 4 SCC 288 — the Second AIJA case. Practice varied across States, some requiring three years and some admitting fresh graduates, and the Court reasoned from the Constitution outwards: Article 233(2) permits no one to be appointed a District Judge unless he has been an advocate or pleader for not less than seven years, and Articles 217(2)(b) and 124(3)(b) require ten years' practice for a Judge of a High Court and of the Supreme Court. If experience at the Bar was indispensable at those levels, it could not be dispensed with where adjudication first begins. The reasoning is structural rather than empirical: it does not rest on any finding about how well fresh graduates were performing, but derives the entry qualification from the qualifications the Constitution itself fixes higher up the same ladder.
It was removed in All India Judges Association v. Union of India, (2002) 4 SCC 247 — the Third AIJA case — on the recommendation of the First National Judicial Pay Commission chaired by Shetty, J., which reported in 1999. The Commission's ground was that legal education had changed: the prescription traced to the Law Commission's Fourteenth Report of 1958, when the LL.B. was a two-year course without practical training, and the three-year course and the integrated five-year degrees had since brought practical instruction into the curriculum. The Law Commission had said something stronger in its 117th Report of 1986 on the Training of Judicial Officers, quoted in the present judgment: "the two years intensive training would outweigh the advantage, if any, of three years practice at the Bar which often enough hardly helps in the matter of equipping oneself".
The point to hold on to is what accompanied the removal. The Court in 2002 did not suppose that a graduate could be put on the bench untrained. It recommended that recruits be trained "for a period of not less than one year and, preferably, for two years". It was put as a recommendation and not as a direction, and it is a fair inference that it did not become universal practice, because the judgment of May 2025 found it necessary to direct in terms that selected candidates "must compulsorily undergo at least 1 year of training before presiding in a Court" — a direction that would have been unnecessary had the 2002 recommendation been generally observed.
The requirement was restored by the judgment of 20 May 2025 in the same 1989 petition — reported as 2025 SCC OnLine SC 1184, and referred to in the dissent as the Sixth AIJA case — answering Issue No. 7 — whether the three-year requirement done away with in 2002 needed to be restored, and if so by how many years. The Court called for the response of every High Court and every State Government. Most High Courts supported restoration, reporting that officers recruited straight from college were unfamiliar with procedure, unable to handle proceedings, and the difficulty most acute where urgent orders had to be passed; that complaints were routinely received about their conduct towards advocates, litigants, staff and superiors; and that academic brilliance was no answer, because such recruits were "not steeped into the culture, etiquette, temper and conduct of the court proceedings". On that material the Court held that twenty years of recruiting fresh graduates "has not been a successful experience".
Now set the 2026 scheme against that history. It requires one year of practice, one year of academy training and one year of clerkship. Strip out the year of practice and what remains — two years of structured training and supervised attachment before independent judicial work — is very close to what the Third AIJA case recommended in 2002 and never obtained. The majority says as much at paragraph 56: the approach "is also consistent with the viewpoint adopted by this Court in the Third AIJA case", which "did not proceed on the assumption that a fresh law graduate could simply enter court and begin presiding without preparation".
The 2026 order is therefore better understood not as a retreat from the 2025 restoration but as the belated enforcement of the 2002 bargain. In 2002 the Court traded practice for training and got neither the practice nor, in most States, the training. In 2026 it has made the training compulsory, added a clerkship the 2002 Court did not contemplate, kept one year of the practice it gave up, and secured the whole arrangement with an evaluation. What was a recommendation is now a direction with a timetable.
The qualification moves inside the service
The consequence of that inversion is a change in the legal character of the requirement, and the judgment does not name it.
Under the direction restored on 20 May 2025, three years of practice was a condition of eligibility to appear — the judgment under review said so in terms, and the majority in August notes the significance of that placement at its paragraph 51: the requirement was prescribed "not merely as a qualification for appointment but as a condition for appearing in the examination itself". A person who lacked it was not a candidate at all. The certificate was produced with the application; the Commission either accepted it or rejected the form.
Under the new scheme, two of the three years are acquired after the candidate has been selected, appointed, paid from public funds and given a designation in the judicial service. The candidate is admitted to the service in order to become qualified for it. The requirement has ceased to be a condition of entry and has become a condition of confirmation.
This is not the same thing as probation, though it will be mistaken for it. Probation tests how a person performs in a post for which they are already qualified. Here the trainee is not being tested against the duties of a Civil Judge — those duties are not being discharged, and paragraph 71 places the whole of this period before the trainee "is entrusted with independent judicial work". He is accumulating the very eligibility that the rule demands. The condition precedent has become a condition subsequent, and the person is inside the service while it remains unfulfilled.
Once that is seen, three features of the scheme that look like separate policy choices turn out to be entailments.
Why there must now be an evaluation
The first entailment is the evaluation report.
A requirement satisfied outside the institution can be proved by attestation. That is what the 2025 direction did: three years of practice was certified by the Principal Judicial Officer of the court concerned, or by an advocate of ten years' standing endorsed by such an officer. Nobody was asked whether the three years had been well spent. The period was the proxy; producing the certificate closed the question.
A requirement satisfied inside the institution cannot work that way, because the institution is now the author of the experience it is being asked to count. The State Judicial Academy trains the trainee; the District Judge and the High Court Judge supervise the clerkship; if that time is to stand in for practice at the Bar, someone must say whether it did. Hence direction 73(vii), and hence the list at paragraph 72 — conduct, diligence, analytical ability, understanding of procedure, capacity to deal with cases, quality of legal reasoning and suitability for judicial office.
The majority sees the risk it has created and warns against it in the same paragraph: the evaluation "should remain objective and reasoned, and it should not become an additional or undefined barrier to appointment". The warning is well placed but it does not dissolve the difficulty, because the difficulty is structural. A selected candidate now stands between selection and appointment, holding a designation but not the post, with confirmation dependent on an assessment by a single Judge on criteria which include "suitability for judicial office" — a phrase the direction does not define and which is not obviously capable of the objectivity the Court asks for. The 2025 scheme had no such interval and needed none. Chandran, J., in dissent, identifies the point in one line: the requirement of the High Court Judge's satisfaction "would create a further hurdle in the smooth transition from training to an active service on probation".
The shorter requirement is the harder one to prove
The second entailment concerns proof, and it runs against the direction in which the order is usually read.
Compare the two certificates. In 2025 the candidate proved three years by an attestation of standing — an advocate of ten years' practice, endorsed by a Principal Judicial Officer, saying that the candidate had practised. In the scheme for advertisements from 1 April 2027, the candidate proves one year by a Certificate of Practice which the High Court "shall not issue" unless the candidate's "presence and participation in effective judicial proceedings" have been "duly recorded", through a mechanism the High Courts are yet to prescribe.
The period has fallen by two-thirds. The standard of proof has risen from attestation to record, and from practice at large to participation in effective proceedings — a qualifier that in trial court practice does a great deal of work, since much of what a junior is listed in on any given day is disposed of by adjournment, by an order on an office objection, or not reached at all. What counts as participation, whether appearing with a senior counts, who maintains the record and against what verification are all remitted to a mechanism that does not yet exist and which each High Court will design separately.
It is entirely possible that one documented year will be harder for a first-generation junior in a district court to assemble than three attested ones. The candidates on whose behalf the review was pressed — the petitioners in Bhumika Trust represent several hundred persons with disabilities, and the majority records at paragraphs 52 and 53 the specific difficulties of women, of persons with disabilities, and of young advocates without professional networks or financial support — are precisely the candidates least likely to be appearing in effective proceedings in their first year, and most likely to be doing the office work that produces no record at all. The order shortens the period they must serve and tightens the evidence they must produce. Whether the relief survives that exchange depends entirely on rules the High Courts have not yet written.
What the dissent is actually about
The dissent of Chandran, J., is described in the reporting as a defence of the three-year rule. Read closely, it is narrower and more interesting than that, and it fastens on exactly the resequencing.
The learned Judge agrees on the merits of prior exposure, and says so: the Chief Justice "has expressed an opinion that the judgment under review does not require to be reconsidered on the fundamental question as to whether some prior experience of the working of the Court is desirable for new entrants into the judicial service; to which I fully concur". What is not accepted is the two years that now sit after selection, and his objections to them are practical rather than doctrinal.
Recruits will serve two years on half pay, without that period being reckoned as service — a burden on them and, the dissent adds, "a strain on the exchequer, without any constructive work being elicited". Courts that today receive a trainee, assign the trainee a court and pay in full — the position, he records, in every State but three — will now wait two years for him: "The training hiatus would see the Courts unmanned and the vacancies unfilled; multiplying by reason of retirements and promotions." And a single selection will now produce two classes of recruit — those entering with the bare one year and those entering with more — creating, the dissent says, either the problem of treating unequals as equals if all undergo the same regime, or an allegation of hostile discrimination if they do not.
The defence of practice as against training rests on what a junior actually does, and it is the passage in the judgment most likely to be quoted: "It is not the complete entrustment of a case for conducting the trial or argument before Court, that moulds a lawyer in the initial years. It is the familiarity with the files, a lawyer acquires from the office of a Senior and the interactions she has with the fraternity of lawyers in the corridors of the Court that initiates her in the profession." And on the asymmetry that makes judicial error different in kind: "A Presiding Officer's mistake puts to peril a litigant, and her remedy is only by way of an appeal. A lawyer's mistake can be remedied by an experienced Presiding Officer, a seasoned Senior or an astute colleague, or even by a ministerial staff of the Court with first-hand experience of the proceedings."
Review, or the mandamus
There is a jurisdictional question underneath the split, and it decides which standard the Court was applying to itself.
The majority twice locates itself in review. At paragraph 43 it is "not persuaded that the Judgment under Review requires to be reconsidered on the fundamental question", and at paragraph 47, having endorsed the reasoning of the 2025 Bench, it says: "We see no reason, in this review jurisdiction, to displace that finding." At paragraph 63 it insists that it is not substituting its assessment for that of the earlier Bench, and that the intervention "is directed to its enforcement and implementation".
But what follows is not an intervention in enforcement. It creates a designation that did not exist, fixes emoluments at one-half of a Judicial Magistrate's remuneration, imposes two years of compulsory training and clerkship with a prescribed split between supervisors, makes appointment conditional on a reasoned report, requires the States to amend their rules within three months, and gives the whole arrangement a sunset of five years with a direction that empirical material be placed before the Court at its expiry. Review corrects an error apparent on the face of the record. A court that finds no such error, and says so, and then constructs a scheme of this scope, is exercising something other than review, whatever it is called.
Chandran, J., stays within review's "well-defined contours of 'an error apparent on the face of the record'", finds no ground, and dismisses the petitions. The dissent does not, however, say that the Court lacks power to change the rule. It says the opposite. Answering the argument that a coordinate Bench cannot displace the three-Judge Bench that removed the requirement in 2002, it calls the objection "quite attractive, in the normal circumstances, but outrightly fallacious in the scenario of a 'continuing mandamus'" — the 1989 petition has never been disposed of, and the Court has been issuing, withdrawing and reissuing directions in it for more than three decades. The last direction in the dissent is procedural: the interlocutory applications and the writ petition are "to be posted before the regular Court concerned with the continuing mandamus".
The disagreement is therefore about the vehicle rather than the power, and the choice of vehicle is not cosmetic. In review the question is whether the earlier Bench erred. Under a continuing mandamus the question is what the system now requires — the question the majority in fact asks and answers, drawing on fresh affidavits from every High Court, from the National Law Universities and from the Amicus Curiae, none of which could show an error in a judgment delivered before they were filed. The reasoning is the reasoning of a supervisory jurisdiction. The label is the label of review, and it is the label that supplies the standard the order is measured against.
The rules below
None of this operates on a candidate until it becomes a State rule. Under Article 234 of the Constitution, appointments of persons other than District Judges to the judicial service of a State are made by the Governor in accordance with rules made by him after consultation with the State Public Service Commission and with the High Court. The judgment binds the rule-makers; it is not itself the eligibility condition, which is why every one of these judgments ends by directing amendment and why paragraph 76 requires the States, in consultation with their High Courts, to notify the necessary amendments within three months.
Uttar Pradesh has just been through that exercise, and is about to go through it again. Following the 2025 judgment, and on the recommendation of the High Court, the State amended Rule 11 of the Uttar Pradesh Judicial Service Rules, 2001 by the Uttar Pradesh Judicial Service (Seventh Amendment) Rules, 2026, approved in Cabinet in late January 2026, to require three years of legal practice for direct recruitment to the Provincial Civil Service (Judicial). Rule 11 is headed "Academic Qualifications", and its structure shows how little the earlier position asked for: a candidate for direct recruitment had to be a bachelor of laws of a recognised University or an advocate enrolled under the Advocates Act, 1961, and to possess a thorough knowledge of Hindi in Devnagri script. The two limbs were alternatives. A degree was enough, and enrolment was one way of qualifying rather than a step beyond it. Press accounts of the amendment describe the three years as reckoned as on the date of the advertisement. I have not seen the notified text, and the reckoning matters: direction (viii) of the 2025 judgment measured the period "from the date of their provisional enrolment/registration with the concerned State Bar Council", which is a different reference point from the date of an advertisement, and the divergence between a direction and the rule that transcribes it is the ordinary place where these schemes lose their shape. Anyone advising on eligibility should read the gazetted rule rather than the report of it — and should now expect it to be superseded within three months of 21 August 2026.
That is the position the machinery is in. A requirement removed in 2002, restored in May 2025, written into the State rules in January 2026, and restructured in August 2026, with the next amendment due before the end of November. The instability is not a criticism of any one of those decisions. It is a feature of settling a recruitment qualification through directions in a petition that has stayed alive for thirty-seven years, where every reconsideration reaches the candidate only after a State has redrafted a rule to match it.
Conclusion
The Court has been careful to say that it is not disturbing the principle. It is not. Paragraph 43 accepts that prior exposure to the working of courts is desirable; paragraph 59 answers in the affirmative the question whether an aspiring Civil Judge should have some familiarity with the functioning of courts, calling it "an indispensable precondition". Both opinions agree on that. Three years also survives as the measure of what must be accumulated.
What has changed is who supplies the experience. Under the rule of 1993, and again under the judgment of May 2025, the three years were served at the Bar, among lawyers and litigants, by a person the judiciary had not yet selected and did not supervise. Under the scheme of August 2026, one year is served there and two are served under the judiciary's own supervision, in its academies and in the chambers of its Judges, by a person it has already chosen. The judiciary has moved from receiving entrants trained by the Bar to training its own, and has kept the old figure to describe the new arrangement.
Whether the substitution works is an empirical question, and the Court has expressly reserved it: the scheme runs for five years, after which material on the quality of recruitment, the efficacy of the training and clerkship and the performance of the officers recruited under it is to be placed before the Court. It is worth noting that the paragraph immediately preceding that direction reasons that "a period of three years would provide sufficient institutional experience to evaluate whether the combination of limited prior practice, structured training and supervised clerkship is achieving the desired objective", before the next paragraph fixes the term at five. The two years of difference are not explained, and they are two years in which the scheme runs without the assessment the Court has said would by then be sufficient.
Until that review, the number to keep in mind is not one and not three. It is two — the two years that a person already selected as a judicial officer will now spend acquiring the qualification for the office they have already been appointed to, at half a magistrate's remuneration, and at the end of which their confirmation turns on a report.
Authored by Eshan Kumar Gupta, Advocate, Hon'ble Allahabad High Court, Lucknow Bench.