By Shouvik Guha

Assistant Professor, NUJS

The Common Law Admission Test, 2018 is now only a few months away and the students in their final year of LL.B. Programme, as well as law graduates, who wish to opt for higher studies at the Masters level, have doubtless started preparing for the CLAT LL.M. entrance examination.

There are several reasons why a student would like to opt for an LL.M. Programme in one of the esteemed national law universities across the country.

Some may wish to begin an academic career involving teaching and/or research, for which an LL.M. degree is mandatory. Especially with the Government of India having recently approved the Seventh Pay Commission’s recommendations for the teachers at the Central/State/private colleges/universities, such a career choice, besides being an immensely respectable and vocational one, is also fairly lucrative at this stage.

Others may wish to gain specialized knowledge in some field (such as International Law, Commercial Law, Intellectual Property Law, Criminal Law etc.) over and above what they have learnt at the undergraduate level –this can also have a crucial impact on their respective competitive careers, be it litigation or working for law firms/companies, in terms of giving them a highly sought-after edge over their contemporaries.

Added to this, of course, is the value addition of the name of a premier institution like a national law university to one’s resume.

With the passage of every year, CLAT LL.M. becomes more competitive, with a steady increase in the number of applicants. With several leading public sector undertakings regularly relying on the score of this examination for their recruitment, this number is only going to go up in the days to come.

Therefore, it is essential that applicants do not let go of any opportunity to prepare themselves better for what awaits them and get every possible edge available over others.

Unlike the undergraduate entrance, CLAT LL.M. has a fairly well-defined syllabus and subjects that it focuses on.
Details about the expected pattern of the question paper is available at an earlier post HERE.

To that end, CLATapult has already framed a comprehensive series of mock test papers modeled in the form of CLAT LL.M., taking into account question papers from previous years and the nature and manner of questions asked.
Students who had subscribed to this mock test series before CLAT LL.M. 2017, had doubtlessly found themselves better equipped than their fellow examinees on the date of the examination.

To further that objective, CLATapult has now decided to create a set of study material, each module dedicated towards one of the disciplines of law that are covered under the examination.

This includes Constitutional Law, Jurisprudence, Criminal Law (covering both the Indian Penal Code and the Code of Criminal Procedure), Law of Contracts, Law of Torts, Public International Law & Human Rights and Environmental Law.

Of these, the first two, viz. Constitutional Law and Jurisprudence, form the bulk of the content, given the increased weightage these two disciplines are accorded in CLAT over the past years.

However, each of the other subjects too has been dealt with in a comprehensive fashion, with the salient aspects highlighted, and important theories, applicable legislations, developments and case-law precedents focused on.

While the content is not meant to cover any of the disciplines in depth, care has been taken to concentrate on those parts of the discipline that are usually amenable to multiple-choice questions as per the usual pattern of CLAT LL.M. papers and as wide a range as possible has been sought to be covered in the module dedicated towards each discipline.

The objective of this set of study material is not to supplant or replace the standard text books or classroom teaching for any of these subjects.

The candidates for the examination would do well to keep that in mind and strengthen their conceptual fundamentals from the regular textbooks that they have studied at the undergraduate level.

The CLATapult study material is not meant as a substitute for those books, but rather as a supplement, meant to hone the conceptual and analytical ability of a student and help him/her to brush up the more important and relevant aspects of a discipline, thus helping the candidate to ace the examination with relative ease.

Any student who subscribes to the study material and the series of mock tests should find himself/herself in a much more confident and comfortable zone to answer anything and everything that the CLAT LL.M. 2018 paper can throw at him/her, come the day of May, 2018. As the saying goes, proper preparation and planning prevents poor performance!

Read More HERE