DU Law Faculty is part of CLAT 2025 but plans own exam: Dean

Delhi University's Faculty of Law will admit to its BBA LLB and BA LLB courses through the CLAT exam this year.

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Students seek a separate exam, apart from CLAT and CUET PG, said the dean, Anju Vali Tikoo, during a conversation with Shradha Chettri. She also shared the faculty's plans of introducing more specialisations, and spoke about the controversy generated by the introduction of Manusmriti into the faculty of law syllabus. Edited excerpts from the conversation:

Q. The university will be welcoming the third batch of students to its fiveyear LLB programme in 2025. What has been the response?

A. It was rather strange that even though we started the course in November 2023, we had students even from National Law Universities (NLU), National University of Juridical Sciences (NUJS), NALSAR, HNLU, NLUJ and various other institutions, withdrawing their admission and joining here. It was a very happy moment for all of us and a reflection of the credibility of DU.

Q. For the three-year LLB, DU was earlier conducting its own entrance exam. Now, admission is through the Common University Entrance Test (CUET PG). But why was the CLAT exam picked for the five-year LLB course?

A. Introduction of the five-year law course had been in the pipeline for sometime but since COVID came in, things got delayed. The Bar Council of India's (BCI) approval had to be sorted.

Once we got the BCI approval, which was slightly delayed in terms of the beginning of the session, we could not have done much. So, by the time we got the approval we did not want to waste a year by conceptualising our own test. We thought the CLAT examination was already there, we only needed the numbers.

Once we completed all the technical formalities, they agreed to share with us the data and numbers. Since the CLAT is a dedicated law-based entrance test, we thought we would get people who are interested in law. We wanted students of that kind.