CLAT 2026

The Common Law Admission Test is conducted by the Consortium of National Law Universities for admission to undergraduate and postgraduate law programmes. It is the single most important entrance examination in Indian legal education, feeding admissions to 24 participating National Law Universities including NLSIU Bangalore, NALSAR Hyderabad, NLU Delhi's peers and WBNUJS Kolkata, along with over 60 private and affiliate institutions that accept CLAT scores. CLAT is deliberately not a knowledge test. Every section is built around comprehension passages of roughly 450 words, and the questions measure how well a candidate reads, reasons and draws inferences rather than what they have memorised. Legal Reasoning, the largest section, supplies the legal principle within the passage itself, so no prior study of law is required. From the 2025 cycle the undergraduate paper was shortened from 150 questions to 120 questions while keeping the two-hour duration, which raised the time available per question and shifted the exam further towards accuracy over speed. The paper is held offline in pen-and-paper mode on a single day in December, ahead of the academic year it admits for.