Becoming a civil judge is not decided by an exam alone. It marks the point at which a person steps into an institution whose daily work touches people's liberty, dignity, property and rights.
Precisely because so much rests on that role, the principles of equality and fairness cannot stop at the examination hall they must accompany a candidate through every stage that follows selection as well.
In Bhumika Trust v. Union of India, the Supreme Court laid down a new path for recruiting and training Civil Judges (Junior Division) by a 2:1 majority. Recognising that considerable time had already passed since the 2025 judgment, the Court devised a transitional arrangement, applicable up to March 31, 2027, under which selected candidates are deemed to have already completed one year of Bar practice. From there, they will be brought in as trainee judicial officers, spending a year in training at the State Judicial Academy and a further year in a structured law clerkship - 6 months under a district judge or a member of the higher judicial services and 6 months under a sitting Judge of the High Court so that, taken together, these stages fulfil the 3-year practice requirement.
Once the clerkship draws to a close, the supervising High Court judge is expected to prepare a reasoned evaluation report and it is only on a satisfactory assessment that the trainee moves into the regular post. But this leaves an important question hanging: what, exactly, does "satisfactory" mean here? Does it rest on tangible markers like legal reasoning, grasp of procedure, professional conduct or could it stretch into vaguer, more subjective ideas of "suitability"? Without a clearer definition, the standard risks being read differently by different evaluators, leaving too much room for personal interpretation to creep in.
To be clear, the worry here is not that judges would act with bias, nor is it a case against supervised judicial training as such. The majority itself acknowledged that clerkship offers genuine value - real exposure to how courts function, the decorum expected within them, the discipline of analysing cases and drafting judicial orders. The real concern lies in how the system is designed: once a single evaluator is tasked with judging a candidate who has already earned their place through a competitive examination, there must be safeguards in place to ensure that discretion, however well-intentioned, does not quietly become a source of inequality.
This concern gains further weight when set alongside the Court's own remarks on unequal opportunity within the profession. In Bhumika Trust, the Court accepted that the quality of Bar experience is far from uniform, shaped as it is by each candidate's individual circumstances. Although it chose not to create separate eligibility tracks, it did acknowledge that professional barriers weigh more heavily on women and on candidates from marginalised and economically weaker backgrounds. The truth is that legal talent does not grow in a level field. Candidates arrive at this stage carrying very different degrees of financial security, mentorship and access to opportunity. If such inequality can already take root before selection, the system owes it to these candidates to ensure that it does not quietly resurface at the clerkship stage.
This is where Articles 14 and 16 of the Indian Constitution come into the picture. Article 14 gives every person the right to equality before the law, while Article 16 guarantees equal opportunity when it comes to public employment. Together, they mean something more than just having a process that looks the same on paper for everyone. Public power has to be exercised in a manner that is fair, reasonable and free from arbitrariness. This idea was laid down in the landmark case of EP Royappa v. State of Tamil Nadu and has been followed in several judgments since, the principle being that arbitrary action by the State goes against the very idea of equality. A clerkship isn't just informal, on-the-job learning. How a trainee performs during this period is actually part of how they eventually enter regular judicial service, which means these constitutional principles apply here too, with full force.
To its credit, the Court has already gone some distance in addressing this. It has laid down that evaluation should take into account a trainee's conduct, diligence, analytical ability, understanding of procedure, quality of legal reasoning and overall suitability, while directing that the process remain "objective and reasoned" rather than harden into "an additional or undefined barrier" to appointment. What is left, then, is not a question of principle but of practice. The task now is to give this direction real shape, through a mechanism transparent enough that no candidate is left wondering how they were judged.
One way to guard against this is to build a safeguard into how clerks are actually allocated. Instead of leaving the process opaque, selected candidates could be shown a list of eligible judges who have clerkship openings and asked to state their preferences. The final matching could then be done through a clear, pre-decided system that keeps the distribution fair. What this would do is cut down the chances of allocations happening through hidden or informal channels and reduce the perception that decisions are influenced by caste, community, gender, region, language, university background, or personal connections. If multiple candidates end up preferring the same judge, the conflict could simply be resolved through rotation or a random draw, keeping the whole process transparent and even-handed.
Allocation is just the first step; the way trainees are evaluated also needs to be made consistent and standardised. A trainee should know beforehand exactly what they'll be assessed on and how. This should be based on clear, job-related skills rather than personal opinions that have nothing to do with how well someone performs their judicial work. There also needs to be a real, working system where a trainee can speak up if they feel they're being treated unfairly or judged arbitrarily and they should be able to do this without worrying that raising the issue will come back to hurt their career.
Going forward, for notifications issued on or after April 1, 2027, candidates will need at least one year of genuine practice at the Bar before entering the same training-and-clerkship framework. The Court has also been careful to leave the door open for course correction: it has directed that the scheme be revisited after a reasonable period, with a fresh look at recruitment quality, trainee performance and the adequacy of training. The point being made here is not to doubt the value of structured clerkship, but to make sure that whatever benefits it offers come wrapped in proper constitutional safeguards.
In his dissenting opinion, Justice Vinod Chandran said that there was no ground for review at all and that a 2-year regime that left trainees on half pay, with no service credit to show for it, could never truly stand in for practice at the Bar. As he put it, "a Presiding Officer's mistake puts to peril a litigant" while a lawyer's error can still be caught and corrected by a senior colleague or an experienced judge. That very disagreement is what makes the evaluation and allocation mechanism so important to get right. The majority's framework, after all, prevailed by the narrowest of margins and its true worth will be measured not on paper, but in how fairly it is carried out in practice.
A candidate who has already earned their place through a competitive examination deserves to step into the clerkship stage with a certain quiet assurance that their future will be judged by standards that are clear, relevant and applied in the same way to everyone. A transparent allocation process, room for candidate preference, well-defined evaluation criteria and firm safeguards against discrimination are not a challenge to the majority's judgment at all. They are the very means by which its own promise is kept: that evaluation remains objective, reasoned and never allowed to become an unspoken barrier standing between a candidate and the Bench.
In the end, a judicial system that truly believes in equality cannot let that belief end with selection; it must extend equally to how those selected are treated in the years that follow. The examination may well identify merit at the outset, but it is the institutional framework built around it that must ensure merit.
Saniya Siddiqui is a LL.B student of the University of Lucknow.