Bhushan made the submission on Monday, August 17, while appearing before the top court in an unrelated case concerning provisions of the Sustainable Harnessing and Advancement of Nuclear Energy for Transforming India Act, 2025, or SHANTI Act. His remarks raised the prospect of a fresh judicial examination of the BCI’s powers and the potential conflict between its regulatory and educational roles.
“Bar Council cannot run a law college,” Bhushan told the court, adding that a petition was being filed on the issue. He argued that an organisation responsible for regulating law colleges should not itself operate such an institution. Bhushan did not identify the college during his submission or disclose details of the proposed petition.
The comments have drawn attention to the India International University of Legal Education and Research, or IIULER, in Goa. The university was established by BCI Trust-Pearl First through a statute enacted by the Goa legislature. The BCI’s own official material identifies IIULER as an institution established by its trust.
The issue has acquired added significance because the BCI is also proposing a National Legal Academy for advocates at the IIULER campus in Goa. BCI chairman Manan Kumar Mishra announced the plan on August 9 during the university’s orientation programme for its 2026 batch. The proposed academy is intended to provide professional training to lawyers and has been conceived on the lines of the National Judicial Academy in Bhopal.
Mishra said the academy followed a Supreme Court direction calling for the establishment of a national institution for advocates. The proposed system envisages compulsory training for lawyers, potentially giving the BCI a substantially larger role in professional education after advocates enter practice. The plan places the academy within the existing IIULER campus at Dharbandora in Goa.
At the heart of Bhushan’s objection is the BCI’s statutory position under the Advocates Act, 1961. The council regulates the legal profession and performs important functions relating to legal education. Its responsibilities include setting standards for law courses and overseeing whether institutions satisfy conditions required for their degrees to qualify graduates for enrolment as advocates. The BCI also inspects universities and law colleges as part of its regulatory responsibilities.
A challenge to the council’s involvement with IIULER could therefore require the Supreme Court to consider where the BCI’s authority to promote legal education ends and whether operation of an educational institution through a trust creates an impermissible overlap with its regulatory functions.
The distinction could be legally important. The BCI Trust is structurally connected with the council but is the entity through which IIULER was established. Any petition would consequently have to address the statutory and institutional relationship between the council, its trust and the university rather than simply the general proposition that the regulator directly operates a college.
Bhushan’s comments came as the BCI was already facing heightened scrutiny over its dealings with law universities and students. Earlier this month, controversy followed a BCI communication temporarily seeking to prevent state bar councils from enrolling members of NALSAR University of Law’s 2026 graduating batch. The communication was withdrawn, and Mishra subsequently apologised to law students while supporting their right to peaceful expression.
The episode intensified discussion within legal academic circles about the extent of the regulator’s powers over universities and graduates. The proposed challenge over IIULER, however, presents a different question: whether the institution charged with supervising standards of legal education can also have an institutional stake in providing that education.
(IPA Service)
