A judiciary interview asks five kinds of question: why you want the post, a procedural problem from the code you will apply on day one, a black-letter provision, an ethical situation, and pendency. The board scores the reasoning you show and the composure you hold, not the recall.
The board scores all of that against a standard it never publishes. No High Court prints a marking scheme for its viva, and the weight the stage carries ranges from 35 marks in the Rajasthan civil judge examination to 150 in Delhi, so the same answer given in two States collects different amounts. Candidates calibrate against one another instead, which is how a coaching-hall habit such as reciting a list of case names with no principle attached to any of them spreads through a batch and survives.
Calibrating against other candidates misses what the stage was put there to catch. A mains script shows whether an aspirant knows the law and can organise it, and it cannot show whether the same aspirant will take a position in a room, hold that position while a judge presses on it, or give it up on being shown to be wrong. Those three responses are the work a judicial officer does in open court every working day, and the interview is the only stage of the selection that watches them happen.
How far that watching should be allowed to decide an appointment is itself before the Supreme Court. In Manoj Goyal v. Rajasthan High Court (2026), the Court upheld a rule that excluded a candidate who scored 7 marks out of 30 in the viva against a 25 per cent floor, holding the minimum rationally connected to the object of selecting capable judicial officers and declining to let a higher aggregate carry him past it. Two months earlier, a Bench headed by the Chief Justice had asked whether such floors are permissible at all and called for a comparative chart of the practice followed across States. Both positions are live, and anyone sitting an interview this cycle is sitting it under the first one.
Sitting under that first position is easiest to picture through a candidate who has already done the hard part. Take an aspirant placed eleventh on the mains list for a civil judge post, with a marked command of contract and property, who is asked one question about an application seeking an investigation into a cognizable offence. She answers on Section 156(3) of the Code of Criminal Procedure, states the magistrate’s options accurately, and adds that the magistrate may instead proceed on the complaint under Section 200.
Every proposition in that answer was correct until 30 June 2024. The board’s follow-up runs to two words, which section, and she works out in the pause that she has quoted a repealed code to a bench that has been applying its replacement for over two years. She had read the new code in her mains preparation. What she had rehearsed aloud, through months of mock interviews, was the old one.
The answer the board wanted was Section 175(3) of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, and it wanted three conditions carried with it: the application has to be supported by an affidavit, the complainant has to have approached the Superintendent of Police under Section 173(4) first, and the magistrate has to make an inquiry and record reasons before ordering anything. Losing marks there is not a failure of memory, and more revision does not cure it. It is a failure to have said the current provision out loud before saying it to a High Court judge.
What a judiciary interview actually decides
A judiciary interview decides selection outright wherever the recruitment rules attach a qualifying mark to it, because a candidate below that mark is not recommended whatever the aggregate says. Manoj Goyal v. Rajasthan High Court, 2026 INSC 699, decided on 15 July 2026 by Karol J and Varale J, is the clearest illustration on the books. The appellant had scored 7 marks out of 30 in the viva for an Additional District Judge post, against a floor of 25 per cent that worked out to 7.5, and he was excluded by half a mark despite standing higher on the written papers than candidates who were appointed.
The Court held that prescribing the minimum was within the legislative competence of the State and rationally connected to the object of selecting capable judicial officers. It put the reasoning in terms a candidate should borrow: a person who fails to show the minimum essential traits in an interview cannot be appointed on a high aggregate alone without compromising the calibre of the higher judiciary. The proviso that produced this result was inserted into Rule 41 of the Rajasthan Judicial Service Rules in 2011 and deleted on 28 November 2017, so it governs that recruitment rather than current Rajasthan practice, and the principle it settled travels to every State that keeps a floor of its own.
The weight of the stage varies more than most candidates expect. Delhi puts 150 marks on the viva and requires 50 per cent in it for general-category candidates and 45 per cent for reserved categories; Uttar Pradesh puts 100; Gujarat puts 50; Rajasthan puts 35 on its civil judge examination. Where to find the figure for a particular State, along with the local-language expectations and the presentation conventions each High Court follows, is set out in the companion article on how to prepare for your judiciary viva voce or personal interview.
One thing about the stage changed in August 2026, and it changes who is in the chair rather than what is asked. In Bhumika Trust v. Union of India, 2026 SCC OnLine SC 1687, a Bench of Chief Justice Surya Kant, Masih J and Chandran J modified by 2:1 the three-year practice requirement that All India Judges Association v. Union of India had restored in May 2025. Through 31 March 2027 every law graduate may apply, and those selected join as Trainee Judicial Officers on half remuneration for a year at the State Judicial Academy and a further year of structured clerkship. From 1 April 2027, a candidate needs one year of actual practice, certified, before sitting the examination at all.
The board in a judiciary interview
Who sits on the board tells a candidate what register to answer in, and the composition differs by State. A Delhi Judicial Service topper describes the personality test as conducted at the Delhi High Court by “the board of Hon’ble Chief Justice along with two seniormost judges and Chief Secretary to Govt. Of Delhi”. The same candidate, who also cleared the Uttar Pradesh examination, describes that board as “headed by a UPPSC member and the other members include a sitting judge of UP High Court and legal experts (generally professors)”.
Those two rooms reward different things. A bench of three sitting judges with a Chief Secretary alongside will press on what a magistrate actually does with a file, while an academic on a Commission board is more likely to open a doctrinal line and follow it down. Another Uttar Pradesh candidate reports an interview that ran “around 40 minutes”, which is long enough for four or five questions with follow-ups, and short enough that one collapsed answer is a visible fraction of the whole.
“Why do you want to become a judge instead of continuing at the Bar?”
This question is asked to find out whether the candidate knows what the post contains, so the answer that scores describes the work rather than the ideal. Toppers report it in almost those words, as “the basic question of why a judge”, and it usually opens the interview rather than closing it. Treating it as a warm-up is the first available mistake.
The answers that lose marks share a shape. Service to society, a childhood ambition, the dignity of the office and an interest in justice are all true of every person in the room, including the three judges conducting the interview, so none of them distinguishes the candidate or shows any knowledge of the job. A board that hears one of these will usually put a second question designed to find the floor beneath it, most often what the candidate thinks a civil judge does between ten thirty and four.
Answer at the level of the work instead. A Civil Judge (Junior Division) hears money suits, rent and eviction matters, injunction applications and execution, with a magistrate’s criminal file alongside it in most States, and the day is made of orders on interlocutory applications rather than judgments on merits. A candidate who says that the attraction is deciding, as against arguing, and who can name what deciding costs in that setting, has answered a question the other candidates answered in the abstract.
The 2026 answer has one more move available, and a board will notice its absence. Since Bhumika Trust, a candidate selected before 31 March 2027 enters as a Trainee Judicial Officer on half remuneration. A year at the State Judicial Academy and a second year of clerkship, split between the District Judiciary and a High Court Judge, come before that officer takes charge of a court. Saying so demonstrates that the candidate has read the judgment governing their own appointment, which is a fair proxy for whether they read the ones governing other people.
Two follow-ups arrive with this question often enough to be worth preparing. The first asks what the candidate will do if not selected this time, and the answer that scores names the next attempt and the work planned in between, rather than declaring that failure is unthinkable. The second is put to candidates who have been practising, and it asks why they are giving up a practice they have built. A board hearing that second answer is listening for whether the move is towards the bench or away from the Bar.
The terms of the appointment are fair game too. Asked whether half remuneration through two years of training is acceptable, a candidate who has thought about the post will say so plainly and without bargaining, because what is being tested is whether the motivation just stated survives contact with the conditions attached to it.
Hold the counter-argument ready, because a board that likes the answer will test it. Chandran J dissented in Bhumika Trust, on the view that “the forensic and analytical skills of an adjudicator are better learnt in the profession by observing what happens in the Courts”. A candidate asked whether the majority or the dissent has the better of it should take a side and give one reason for it, since nobody in the room expects a settled answer to a question the Supreme Court itself split on.
“An application under Section 175(3) BNSS is before you. What are your options?”
Three courses are open on such an application, and under the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita none of them is reachable until the conditions the provision now imposes have been satisfied. The magistrate may direct the police to investigate, may take the complaint route and proceed under Section 223, or may decline the application. Toppers report this question in its Section 156(3) form, coupled with the option of converting the matter into a complaint case under Section 200, which is what the same question looked like for forty years.
The conditions are what the question is now testing. Section 175(3) allows a Magistrate empowered under Section 210 to order an investigation after two things have happened: the applicant must have exhausted recourse under Section 173(4), which means having approached the Superintendent of Police, and the application must be supported by an affidavit evidencing that. The Magistrate must then make such inquiry as is considered necessary and must record reasons showing why a police investigation is called for on these facts. Where the complaint is against a public servant, a further safeguard applies before any direction issues.
Say what the affidavit is for, because a board will often ask. Putting the complainant on oath at the threshold gives the court something to act on if the allegations turn out to be fabricated, and it forces the earlier approach to the police to be recorded rather than asserted from the Bar. The practical effect is that an application drafted on the old template, carrying no affidavit and no Section 173(4) history, is incomplete on its face.
An order under this provision is also no longer a one-line endorsement. High Courts through 2025 and 2026 have set aside directions that recite the section and order an investigation without disclosing why the Magistrate thought one necessary, on the footing that the recorded reasons are the application of judicial mind the section requires. A candidate who says that the order has to speak, and that a rubber-stamp order is liable to be set aside, is answering at the level the room is working at.
The follow-up on the pre-cognizance hearing
The follow-up that separates candidates is what happens if the Magistrate takes the complaint route instead. The proviso to Section 223(1) bars a Magistrate from taking cognizance of an offence on a complaint without first giving the proposed accused an opportunity of being heard, which is a stage the Code of Criminal Procedure never had. The notice issued under the proviso has to append the complaint, the sworn statement and the statements of any witnesses, so that the hearing is a real one rather than an attendance.
The Supreme Court settled the consequence of skipping it in Parvinder Singh v. Directorate of Enforcement, 2026 INSC 519, holding the proviso mandatory and cognizance taken without the hearing void ab initio. The Court applied it to a complaint filed before the Sanhita came into force, where cognizance was taken after 1 July 2024, reasoning that ministerial steps taken before that date do not amount to an “inquiry” within Section 2(1)(k) and so do not save the proceeding from the new requirement. It held the safeguard applicable to proceedings under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act as well.
A candidate who can add that the point is not fully closed is answering above the band. In April 2026 the Delhi High Court flagged a conflict on when cognizance is taken for these purposes and referred the question to a larger bench. Knowing that a reference is pending is worth more than a confident statement that the law is settled, because an officer who treats an open question as closed will decide the next one wrongly.
“Does Article 20(2) protect a person who has been acquitted?”
Article 20(2) does not protect a person who has been acquitted, because the clause speaks of a person “prosecuted and punished” for the same offence, and a prosecution that ended in an acquittal produced no punishment on which the bar can rest. Interviews report this question in its comparative form, as the difference between Article 20 and Section 300 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, and most candidates get it wrong in the same direction. They treat the fundamental right as the wider of the two protections because it is the constitutional one.
The illustration to reach for is a smuggling case from 1953 in which one set of facts was dealt with twice. In Maqbool Hussain v. State of Bombay, AIR 1953 SC 325, customs authorities confiscated gold the appellant had brought into the country, and he was later prosecuted under the Foreign Exchange Regulation Act on those same facts. The Supreme Court held that the proceedings before the customs authorities were not a “prosecution” and that the confiscation was not a “punishment” inflicted by a judicial tribunal, so Article 20(2) did not bar the later trial at all.
Section 337 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, which carries forward Section 300 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, is the wider protection of the two. A person once convicted or acquitted of an offence is not to be tried again for the same offence, nor on the same facts for any other offence for which a different charge might have been made against him. The statutory bar therefore covers autrefois acquit and autrefois convict together, while the constitutional guarantee reaches only the second of them.
State the relationship rather than leaving the board to infer it. The fundamental right sets a floor no legislature can lower, and the Sanhita sits above that floor by choice, so a person acquitted in India is protected by a provision Parliament could in principle amend and not by one entrenched in Part III. Candidates who reach that sentence tend to get a harder question next, which is the intended outcome. A fuller treatment of the two pleas is available in the article on autrefois acquit and autrefois convict.
Answering when the board uses the old section number
Boards still put these questions in the old numbering, and a candidate who answers only in the new numbering has created a problem that did not exist. The safe form is to answer in both: name the provision the examiner used, give its current number once, and then continue in whichever one the examiner chose. “Section 300 of the Code, now Section 337 of the Sanhita” costs four words and settles the register for the rest of the answer.
Correcting the board is what loses marks here. A judge who says Section 300 has been applying it since before the candidate finished school, and is using the number that is quickest in the room rather than making an error to be fixed. Offer the mapping once, keep it out of the way after that, and do not repeat the correction in a later answer.
What is being tested is whether the candidate holds the two systems together, and a candidate who can work in only one of them will show it without any prompting. A broader mapping of the old codes onto the new ones is set out in the comparison of the Indian Penal Code and the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita.
“A lawyer from your old chambers appears before you. What do you do?”
Disclose the association on the record and let the other side be heard on it, then recuse if a reasonable observer knowing those facts would doubt the impartiality of the court. Toppers describe this class of question as “situation based questions to judge your integrity and non-partisanship”, and it is rarely put as a rule question. The board gives facts and waits, because what it is testing is whether the candidate reaches for a standard at all or improvises something that merely sounds reasonable.
The standard to reach for is the Restatement of Values of Judicial Life, adopted by the Supreme Court in Full Court on 7 May 1997, which runs to sixteen clauses and covers this situation twice over. Clause 3 requires that “close association with individual members of the bar, particularly those who practice in the same court, shall be eschewed”. Clause 7 goes further and states that “a judge shall not hear and decide a matter in which a member of his family, a close relation or a friend is concerned”.
Clause 1 supplies the reasoning that explains why disclosure alone is not enough. Justice must not merely be done but must also be seen to be done, and the conduct of members of the judiciary has to reaffirm the people’s faith in its impartiality. Say that clause aloud in the answer, because it is the test a candidate applies when they ask what a reasonable observer would think, and naming it converts an instinct into a standard.
One addition lifts this answer above the others. The judges adopted the Restatement voluntarily and it carries no enforcement machinery, so it binds as a statement of what the office requires rather than as a law with a sanction attached. A candidate who says so has shown that they know what kind of instrument they are citing, which is a different and better thing from having memorised its clauses.
Three variants of the same interview question
The relative at the Bar is the commonest variant, and Clause 4 answers it directly: a judge should not permit any member of the immediate family or any other close relative, if a member of the Bar, “to appear before him or even be associated in any manner with a cause to be dealt with by him”. The second half of that clause is the part to quote. It reaches a relative who is instructing or advising behind the scenes and not only one who is on their feet in court.
Clause 10 answers the gift variant, under which a judge shall not accept gifts or hospitality except from family, close relations and friends. Add what the clause leaves to judgment, which is that the exception cannot be stretched to cover hospitality from a friend who is also a litigant or an advocate practising in that court. The third variant, the local official who telephones about a listed matter, is answered by Clause 8 and by the plain course of declining to discuss a pending matter outside court and recording the approach if it is pressed.
“How would you deal with pendency, and where would you use technology?”
A judicial officer controls a docket rather than a national backlog, so this answer starts with listing practice and adjournments and reaches technology second. Toppers report the question in close to this form, asking how the candidate will deal with pendency and use technology as a judge, and most answers go straight to digitisation because that is the part that sounds modern. A board that hears an answer beginning with software has learned that the candidate has not thought about the courtroom.
Get the scale right first, because a wrong figure is remembered. The National Judicial Data Grid showed 5,19,64,100 cases pending in the district judiciary, of which 4,07,40,765 were criminal and 1,12,23,335 civil, on a page last updated in July 2026. The criminal share matters for the answer. A criminal docket moves at the pace of the production of accused persons, the attendance of witnesses and the filing of police reports, none of which a judge accelerates by working faster.
Against those constraints, what the officer does control is narrow and worth naming precisely. Fixing realistic dates rather than short ones that cannot hold sits in the officer’s own hands, and so does refusing an adjournment without a recorded reason. So does grouping similar matters on one day, disposing of interlocutory applications instead of carrying them forward, and writing shorter orders on uncontested points. Every one of those is a docket decision rather than a policy one, and a candidate who gives three of them concretely has answered the question that was asked.
The follow-up on adjournments has a statutory answer, and candidates who reach for it do better than those who answer on instinct. The proviso to Order XVII Rule 1 of the Code of Civil Procedure, introduced by the 2002 amendment, bars the grant of more than three adjournments to a party during the hearing of a suit, and the same amendment made an award of costs for an adjournment mandatory rather than discretionary.
Add the qualification, because a board that knows the rule is waiting for it. Order XVII Rule 1 has to be read with Rule 2, and courts have held that where the circumstances are genuinely beyond a party’s control the three-adjournment ceiling does not forbid a further one. A candidate who states the rule as an absolute has described a provision that the courts do not apply absolutely, which in front of sitting judges is the more visible error.
Technology then arrives as a tool with known limits. The eCourts Phase III project carries an outlay of Rs 7,210 crore, of which about Rs 2,740.86 crore had been released to High Courts and implementing agencies by April 2026. It has supported more than 3.97 crore video-conference hearings across 3,240 court complexes and 1,272 jails, alongside roughly 1.07 crore e-filed cases and 660.36 crore pages of digitised records.
Those figures set the ceiling on what the answer can claim. Video conferencing removes the delay caused by an undertrial not being produced, and e-filing removes the counter queue. Neither of them produces a witness who has stopped attending.
Close on the limit rather than the promise. Digitisation moves paper faster and does not create judges, and the pendency figure responds to sanctioned strength, vacancy levels and court infrastructure well before it responds to software. One sentence to that effect shows the board a candidate who will not mistake a dashboard for a disposal.
The answers that lose marks in a judiciary interview
Most marks in a judiciary interview are lost after the first answer, in what the candidate does when the board presses, which is why a rehearsed opening is worth far less than candidates expect. Five failures account for the bulk of it, and four of the five are recoverable in the room.
Bluffing a section number is the first, and the least recoverable. A board that suspects a guess will ask for the sub-section, then for what the proviso says, and the candidate who invented the first number now has to invent two more in front of people who apply the provision weekly. The cost is not the wrong number. It is that every confident answer given afterwards is discounted.
Refusing to take a position is the second. Asked whether a particular practice is right, a candidate who says there are arguments on both sides and stops there has demonstrated the one quality a judicial officer cannot have, since the work consists of deciding matters on which there are arguments on both sides. Give the reasons, then decide, and say which way you have decided.
Taking a position and refusing to abandon it is the third, and it mirrors the second. When a judge puts a proposition the candidate has not considered, the response that scores is to think about it visibly and concede if it is right, because conceding to a better argument is the daily work of the office. Defending an untenable answer through four exchanges converts a small error into a finding about temperament.
Reciting a code the candidate has not read since it changed is the fourth, and it is the failure the scenario above turns on. The fifth is treating a policy question as an invitation to criticise the judiciary. Asked about pendency or vacancies, a candidate who blames the system has misread the room, because they are applying to join it and the board is listening for what this applicant would do with the file in front of them.
Saying that you do not know
Say that you do not know, without decoration, and then offer whatever you do have. A candidate who says that they have not read the provision but that the principle appears to be a particular one, and asks whether that is the right line, has kept the exchange going and given the board something to mark. That is closer to what a judge does with an unfamiliar point than a confident wrong answer is.
The recovery matters more than the admission itself. Do not apologise twice, do not explain why the topic was not covered, and do not let one gap change the register of the answers after it.
A topper who cleared both the Delhi and the Uttar Pradesh examinations puts the preparation point plainly, saying that no additional preparation was done for the interview because it is a personality test and “a few days of preparation cannot alter your personality too much”, while mock interviews help by calming the nerves and building confidence. The nerves are the part a candidate can prepare. The temperament is the part being marked.
Frequently asked questions
How long does a judiciary interview last?
Reported interviews run between fifteen and forty minutes, with one Uttar Pradesh candidate describing an interview of “around 40 minutes”. Length is not a signal of how it went. A short interview often means the board reached its assessment quickly, and that assessment can go either way.
Is there a minimum qualifying mark in the judiciary interview?
That depends on the State, and where a floor exists it decides selection. Delhi requires 50 per cent in the viva for general-category candidates and 45 per cent for reserved categories. In Manoj Goyal v. Rajasthan High Court (2026) the Supreme Court upheld the exclusion of a candidate who fell half a mark short of a 25 per cent floor despite a higher aggregate, and a separate Bench has since asked whether such floors are permissible at all.
Are questions asked from the candidate’s own bio-data?
Yes, and they come up more often than candidates prepare for. Reported questions include Sanskrit terms picked off a candidate’s matriculation record and questions on the constitutional status of the candidate’s home State. Read your own form before the interview and be able to speak to every line on it, including the school subjects and the place of birth.
Should answers be given in English or the State language?
Follow the language the question was put in, and switch only if you are invited to. Several States expect working proficiency in the local language because the trial court record is maintained in it, and those expectations differ enough by State that they are set out separately in the companion preparation article.
Does the three-year practice rule still apply to candidates interviewing in 2026?
Not in the form it took in 2025. Bhumika Trust v. Union of India (August 2026) modified that requirement, so through 31 March 2027 all law graduates may apply and those selected join as Trainee Judicial Officers with an academy year and a clerkship year, while from 1 April 2027 one year of certified practice is required before the examination.
References
- Manoj Goyal v. Rajasthan High Court, 2026 INSC 699 (Supreme Court of India, 15 July 2026), reported at Verdictum and LiveLaw.
- Bhumika Trust v. Union of India, 2026 SCC OnLine SC 1687 (21 August 2026), reported at SCC Times.
- All India Judges Association v. Union of India (20 May 2025), Supreme Court Observer.
- Parvinder Singh v. Directorate of Enforcement, 2026 INSC 519, on the proviso to Section 223(1) of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023, discussed at Bar and Bench.
- Magistrate-ordered investigation under Section 175(3) of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023, SCC Times, 6 January 2026.
- Maqbool Hussain v. State of Bombay, AIR 1953 SC 325, on Article 20(2) of the Constitution of India.
- Restatement of Values of Judicial Life, adopted by the Supreme Court of India in Full Court on 7 May 1997, sixteen clauses, text reproduced at ThePrint.
- National Judicial Data Grid, district and taluka courts pendency dashboard, njdg.ecourts.gov.in, figures as last updated July 2026.
- eCourts Phase III implementation status and outlay, IMPRI.
- Judicial service topper interviews recording board composition and reported questions, Lawctopus and Lawctopus.
- Supreme Court reference on minimum cut-off marks in judicial service interviews (27 May 2026), Bar and Bench.
This article is for general information and is not legal advice. Recruitment rules, interview weightages and qualifying marks are set by each State and High Court and are amended from time to time, so verify the position in the official notification for the examination you are sitting.