The Bar Council of India directed State Bar Councils that no student of NALSAR University of Law who obtained a law degree in 2026 should be enrolled as an advocate until further orders. The direction was a response to a campaign, attributed to some students of the institution, opposing the Chief Justice of India's participation in the university's convocation. Because enrolment with a State Bar Council is the gateway to practising law, the direction would have suspended the professional entry of an entire graduating cohort. Members of the Council debated the measure and concluded, within hours, that the great majority of the batch had not taken part; the order was modified the same day and the enrolment bar removed. The episode is instructive less for its outcome than for what it revealed about the scope of a regulator's power over entry to a profession, and about how a body's general supervisory authority over State Bar Councils can be turned on a class of individuals collectively.

The BCI was established in 1961 on the recommendations of the All India Bar Committee of 1953, chaired by Justice S.R. Das, and the 14th Report of the Law Commission (1958) on the reform of judicial administration. Its purpose was self-regulation: a Bar that sets and enforces its own standards is insulated from executive interference, which matters in a system where advocates routinely litigate against the state. But self-regulation carries its own hazard, and this episode showed it — the power to withhold enrolment is the power to deny livelihood, and when it is applied to an entire graduating class rather than to identified individuals, it substitutes collective consequence for individual culpability. The swift withdrawal, on the reasoning that most of the batch was innocent, is an acknowledgement of exactly that objection.