Who gets to discipline a law student? The NALSAR verdict

The Bar Council of India briefly froze enrolment of NALSAR's 2026 graduates after students objected to inviting Chief Justice of India Surya Kant as convocation chief guest. The now-reversed order has revived questions over whether student discipline rests with universities or the legal regulator.Who gets to discipline a law student? The NALSAR verdictThree circulars. One evening. Zero students actually found guilty of anything.That's the entire arc of the Bar Council of India's (BCI) confrontation with NALSAR University of Law this week, a regulator that banned an entire graduating class from the legal profession, then unbanned them, then closed the file, all before sunrise.If you squint, it looks like institutional chaos but look closer, and it's a live stress-test of a question Indian legal education has spent six decades avoiding. When a law student steps out of line, who owns the discipline — the campus, or the profession's gatekeeper?THE TRIGGERAround 70 members of NALSAR's outgoing LLB batch, later joined by roughly 450 students across batches, submitted a representation to the Vice-Chancellor asking the university to reconsider inviting Chief Justice of India Surya Kant as convocation chief guest. Their objection traced back to a Supreme Court hearing on police action against NEET protesters, where the CJI-led bench told a lawyer seeking urgent listing, "Please don't waste our time. We don't have time to watch these videos" — a remark that had already drawn criticism from sections of the bar. The response came as a shock to many.BCI chairman Manan Kumar Mishra directed every State Bar Council to freeze enrolment of all 2026 NALSAR graduates. His circular didn't mince words: "A student of Law, having no regard or respect for the highest Judicial Office of the country, is not expected to be a responsible or sensible Advocate, Teacher or a Judge." He also alleged, citing unnamed "reliable sources," that faculty had been involved in "misleading, instigating and misguiding" students. The backlash, almost immediately, came from inside the profession itself. Vijay Gopal, an advocate of the Telangana High Court, said the BCI chairman had "absolutely no authority" to decide whether eligible graduates would be enrolled. Advocate Ravi Teja called the order "very disappointing," adding: "Law students are future lawyers. They are expected to question, think, discuss and speak for constitutional values." Ratna Singh, legal head of the Cockroach Janta Party, told 'The Tribune'. "The Chairman should think before passing such orders, the position is not his personal entity."Within hours, Mishra reversed course. By the next morning, the inquiry itself was dropped. The BCI said it was satisfied the batch "had no role in any disturbance or movement." Mishra signed off with: "Dissent is welcome in a democracy; public ridicule of it is often counterproductive."A regulator that reverses three times in one news cycle was never on solid ground the first time.WHAT THE STUDENTS THEMSELVES ARE SAYINGTalk to law students right now, not just the ones named in any BCI circular, but the ones watching this unfold from campuses across the country, and the answer converges fast. No, this was never the BCI's call to make.Jaswanth Adari, a third-year student at Damodaram Sanjivayya National Law University, Visakhapatnam, put the constitutional architecture plainly. "The university disciplines the student; the BCI regulates the profession and standards of legal education. The BCI is not automatically the ultimate disciplinary authority over every law student. Universities are autonomous institutions. BCI is the professional regulator of Lawyers. According to the Advocates Act, BCI can only set standards."A fourth-year student at NALSAR pushed the argument further, framing it as a matter of basic adult rights rather than institutional turf."A law student is a person with rights and freedom like every other citizen of the country. They are not minors who need to be disciplined by parents or teachers, they are mature adults studying the mechanism of legal institutions of this country, and they can do whatever they want to as long as the Constitution allows it. The question shouldn't be whether they need to be disciplined by anyone. The question should be whether the people running these institutions, be it a university or a forum like the BCI, are disciplined by the very law they claim to have mastered."A second-year student at National Law University, Jodhpur, was blunter still.He said, "We aren't advocates enrolled under BCI. BCI should limit itself only to making regulations regarding universities and curriculum. Even if the university has the right to discipline us, it should be in a way that doesn't take away our free speech and other fundamental rights. A true student is already self-disciplined. Disciplinary proceedings should come into play only for gross indiscipline. With regard to BCI, it should have no control over us. Even for professionalism and etiquette, BCI should have power only once we enrol as an advocate. Before that, we are students like any other student of any other field. BCI itself should look at the level of internal democracy it has before poking its nose into our matters."WHAT THE PROFESSION THINKS?The sharpest institutional critique came from a corporate lawyer handling media affairs, who didn't stop at this episode."The BCI chairman has repeatedly used his office to issue orders or directives on matters that are, at best, within the jurisdiction of the Council. The law never granted him such powers, and yet he continues to employ them willy-nilly," he told India Today.Strip away the frustration in that assessment, and what's left is a fairly simple statutory rule, one that Gaurav Kumar, an advocate and legal consultant with the Jharkhand Micro and Small Enterprises Facilitation Council, Ranchi, laid out plainly. "A law student is primarily under the administrative and disciplinary control of the university where they are enrolled. As long as the person is pursuing an LLB, the university's rules, regulations and disciplinary framework apply. The Bar Council of India comes into the picture primarily after the student completes the degree and seeks enrolment as an advocate, under the Advocates Act, 1961. At that stage, professional conduct and enrolment are governed by the BCI and the statutory framework. In short: university controls the student; BCI regulates the advocate after enrolment."It's that exact rule the BCI's order seemed to skip past. Lawrence Liang, Professor at the School of Law, BML Munjal University, went straight for the jurisdictional flaw."The order appeared to be a unilateral one issued by the Chairman, seemingly in contravention of the Council's own statutory structure. The BCI's disciplinary powers under the Advocates Act apply only to enrolled advocates, not students. The students were exercising their right to free speech — and even if any inquiry were warranted, that was the university's sole prerogative," he tells India Today.in.WHAT THE STATUTE ACTUALLY SAYSThat two-stage picture — university first, BCI after enrolment — isn't just informed opinion. It's a fair reading of the Advocates Act, 1961 itself. Section 7 gives the BCI two distinct jobs, setting standards for legal education and recognising the universities that award law degrees (an institutional power), and separately, regulating the conduct and enrolment of advocates — people already, or about to be, on the roll.Section 24 lays out who qualifies for enrolment; Section 49 lets the BCI make rules to enforce that.Courts have been generous to the BCI on the institutional side. In Bar Council of India v. Bonnie FOI Law College (2018), the Supreme Court upheld the BCI's power to inspect colleges and enforce educational standards. In 2023, ruling on Rabi Sahu's case, the Court went further, holding that the BCI can insist a law degree come from a BCI-recognised institution before granting enrolment.What none of this case law does is hand the BCI a general disciplinary jurisdiction over students as students. Disciplinary power under the Act is built for advocates already on the roll; It runs through State Bar Council disciplinary committees, with the BCI as an appellate authority above them. A student who hasn't enrolled yet isn't inside that machinery at all.Their conduct on campus, such as a letter to their own Vice-Chancellor, sits inside the university's own disciplinary and governance framework. Not the regulator's.The BCI's climbdown is itself the tell. What it suggests is that the Council reached past its statutory remit, into campus dissent, faculty-student dynamics, conduct during the course of legal study, territory that belongs to university governance and, wherever free expression is implicated, to constitutional protections no regulatory circular can override.The file on NALSAR's 2026 batch is closed. The jurisdictional question it tore open, about how far a profession's gatekeeper can reach backward into a student's years on campus, is not.- EndsPublished By: Deebashree MohantyPublished On: Aug 14, 2026 13:01 IST