No reforms for CLAT 2027 as NLU Consortium releases expert committee report 5 months after submission

The Governing Body of the Consortium of National Law Universities has decided not to change the pattern or syllabus of the Common Law Admission Test (CLAT) 2027, even as it published the Expert Committee's long-awaited report on reforming the exam.

The development was notified through a July 21 press release on the Consortium's website.

The Committee's report recommends changing the exam's focus from testing legal and general knowledge to evaluating logical and legal aptitude, with greater emphasis on genuine reasoning skills instead of coaching-based memorisation.

The delay in publishing the report has defeated the very timeline it was built around. In its February 2 letter submitting the report, the Committee had urged the Advisory Board to publish it "at the earliest opportunity" and had said that its proposed 2027 rollout was feasible only if the public got access to the report soon after. The Consortium has taken more than five months to act on that request.

The Governing Body, however, has directed the CLAT 2027 Convenor and paper setters to consider the Committee's suggestions on question quality without altering the exam's structure or syllabus.

The report recommends restructuring the undergraduate paper from five sections to three - Logical Reasoning and Legal Aptitude; Language and Comprehension; and Quantitative Techniques. It proposes entirely dropping the General Knowledge and Current Affairs section. For the postgraduate exam, the Committee has recommended keeping these 3 sections at a reduced weightage alongside 2 new ones - Legal Knowledge and a constructed-response Problem Question.

It has also recommended professionalising the paper-setting process, currently rotated annually among Convenor universities, through either an external tender or in-house expertise.

The Committee's report is now published on the Consortium's website and the Consortium has invited feedback from experts, students and the public until August 31, 2026.

At a meeting convened at the National Judicial Academy, Bhopal by President of the Consortium Prof S Shanthakumar on May 17, 2026, it was resolved that the Office of the Chief Justice of India (CJI) would constitute a separate committee to further examine the report's recommendations, which the Governing Body said it would take up together with public feedback ahead of CLAT 2028.

The Expert Committee was constituted on September 15, 2025 and its formation was reported the following month. Its co-convenors are Prof Dev Saif Gangjee of the University of Oxford and Prof Tarunabh Khaitan of the London School of Economics, joined by Prof Shyamkrishna Balganesh of Columbia Law School, Prof Pritam Baruah of BML Munjal University and Prof Surabhi Ranganathan of the University of Cambridge.

After inviting public feedback between October 15 and November 4, 2025, the Committee presented an interim report on November 11, 2025 and a final slate of recommendations on January 14, 2026, before submitting its final report on February 2, 2026.