MADURAI: The Madurai Bench of Madras High Court has directed the convenor of Common Law Admission Test (CLAT) to include the Tamil Nadu National Law School (TNNLS) in Srirangam on its official website as one of the participating institutions for the admission process.
A bench, comprising of Justices V Ramasubramanian and V M Velumani, directed the Gujarat Educational Law University (Organising University of CLAT 2014) to include the Tamil Nadu National Law School in Srirangam as the 15th college on the list of ‘participating universities’ on the official website of Common Law Admission Test.
The bench also directed the convener to send the list of students passed in CLAT to the TNNLS in order to fill the seats in accordance with the reservation policy.
The interim order was passed on a petition filed by a Tiruchy based advocate R Rajkumar, who submitted that the TNNLS was not included the core committee of CLAT 2014 in spite of their inclusion to join consortium and in spite of the facilities available in the Srirangam institution.
Hence the petitioner argued that it would be in the best interests of prospective candidates as also legal education as whole, the CLAT be monitored and conducted by a nodal agency formed by the Bar Council of India and the Ministry of Human Resources so as to avoid the allegation of partiality and favouritism against a particular university conducting the exam each year.
The petitioner also made a representation on April 1, this year, to set up a nodal agency for conducting and monitoring the CLAT and also for inclusion of TNNLS in the core committee of CLAT 2014.
As there was no response, the petitioner approached the court.
Earlier on April this year, the same division bench ordered the provisional inclusion of the TNNLS for this year’s Common Law Admission Test (CLAT) for filling up seats in 14 National Law Universities.