The Supreme Court has thrown a legal lifeline to a Chhattisgarh district court employee, granting him interim permission to sit for his third-year LL.B. examinations after both his employer and the High Court's Division Bench blocked his path, a ruling that puts the brakes on a rigid application of new service rules that threatened to derail his legal education mid-course.
The petitioner, appointed as an Assistant Grade-III at the Principal District and Sessions Court in September 2022 on a three-year probation, had secured proper authorization from his appointing authority to attend the first and second years of his LL.B. as a regular student. The ground shifted beneath him when the Chhattisgarh District Judiciary Establishment (Recruitment and Conditions of Service) Rules, 2023, took effect on October 6, 2023, introducing Rule 11, which stripped probationary employees of the right to appear as regular candidates in academic examinations, permitting only private or correspondence enrollment.
When the petitioner sought clearance for his third year under the new regime, his employer refused. The High Court's Single Bench initially ruled in his favor, finding that the saving clause under Rule 47 shielded him from the new restrictions, but the Division Bench reversed that order entirely, leaving him without recourse days before his exams commenced.
A bench of Justice Vikram Nath and Justice Sandeep Mehta acted swiftly upon learning that the petitioner had already missed one examination paper the previous day due to the denial of permission, a direct and irreversible consequence of the impugned order. Treating the matter with urgency, the Court observed that allowing him to lose an entire academic year over a permission dispute pending full adjudication would cause disproportionate harm.
Noting that "orders in relation to yesterday's exam will be passed subsequently," the bench directed that the petitioner be permitted to appear in all remaining examination papers forthwith as an immediate interim measure, while the broader legal question around Rule 47's saving clause and the applicability of the 2023 Rules to mid-course students remains reserved for detailed consideration.
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