The 20-year age limit to appear in the Common Law Admission Test (CLAT) remains unaffected by the Allahabad high court judgment of May 2014, in which the court had noted that there can be no such restriction since the Bar Council of India (BCI) had already scrapped the maximum age limit on undergraduates.

CLAT 2015 convenor RMLNLU’s vice chancellor Prof Gurdip Singh commented: “In the core committee meeting we discussed this issue. It was pointed out that [the judgment] was applicable to only those [two candidates who had filed the petition before the Allahabad HC]. There is no high court judgment coming in the way [of the presently fixed eligibility criteria].”

When asked about the effect of the high court’s observation that a BCI notification had declared the age limit criteria unconstitutional, Singh said: “The core committee has the power to independently decide eligibility criteria. The order doesn’t affect the authority of the CLAT core committee as such.”

The Allahabad high court had in May directed CLAT 2014 convenor GNLU Gandhinagar to allow two 21-year-old CLAT aspirants to appear in the entrance test.

This year’s age limit relaxation has been granted to candidates from the persons-with-disabilities (PwD) category, from which candidates up to 22 years of age can now appear, as reported by Legally India. Until CLAT 2015, only candidates from the scheduled categories (SC/ST) were granted this relaxation.