The Delhi High Court has temporarily stayed the 50% horizontal local domicile reservation that NLU Delhi had announced in January 2020, reported Livelaw today.

The court directed the university to reverse the notification of the 50% reservation by issuing a new one its website, without the reservation before 2 July, because the petitioner had made out a good prima facie case.

“A further one week period is given to enable the students to apply afresh who may be interested in applying for the admission process,” the bench of Justices Hima Kohli and Subramonium Prasad said, according to LiveLaw.

The petitioner Pia Singh, who wants to apply for an LLM from NLU Delhi, had argued that the 50% domicile reservation in addition to 22% OBC and 10% EWS reservations in the LLM “without increasing the number of seats as per MHRD guidelines is adversely affecting her chances of selection and her future career prospects”.

The petition noted, according to LiveLaw:

But respondent university is not giving this reservation to the domicile of the state but to the students who have passed their qualifying examination from Delhi. Delhi is a metro city and capital of India and a hub for the prominent educational institutes. Students from every corner of the country came here to study. Circumstances may arise that many students who are the permanent resident of Delhi may not get admission in any school/college situated in Delhi and they got enrolled in any other institutes located outside Delhi.

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And even we consider that the University has such power [to implement such reservation] then also the quantum of reservation i.e. 50% is bad in law as it has reduced the all India unreserved category seats to the extent of 20% of total seats.

If we add up all the kinds of reservation provided by the respondent university then the quantum of total reservation is 80% which means, now OBC reserved seats are more than the Unreserved category seats. Hence, quantum of 50% reservation is also against the principle of equality enshrined under part-III of the constitution.