The West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences (WBNUJS or NUJS) is an elite National Law University located in Bidhannagar, Kolkata, West Bengal, India. In 2021, it was ranked fourth among law colleges in India by National Institutional Ranking Framework and second by India Today. It comes under the exclusive chancellorship and purview of the Chief Justice of India. The university was one of the first law universities to offer a five-year integrated B.A. LLB (Hons.) degree program, and an LLM program. Admission to the B.A. LLB degree program is through the Common Law Admission Test, a highly competitive, nationwide entrance examination, held jointly by the national law schools. NUJS also offers MPhil, Ph.D., and diplomas in business laws and other programs, in addition to a number of online courses that attract students from 17 countries across the world. History NUJS was established in 1999 by the Bar Council of India (BCI), with the government of West Bengal. The Founder-Vice-Chancellor was Professor N.R. Madhava Menon, a former Professor of law at Delhi University, and Founder-Director, National Law School of India University (NLSIU), Bangalore, who is credited with revolutionising the field of legal education in India, by starting the concept of "national law schools", as opposed to the traditional law colleges prevalent before. The NUJS, along with NLSIU, remain the only two national law schools that have the honourable Chief Justice of India as the Chancellor, evoking an aura of exclusivity and rare stature to these National Law Schools. The university was the brainchild of then Chief Minister Jyoti Basu. Other eminent personalities without whose help and active intervention the university could not have been founded, include Sh. Jyoti Basu, the former Chief Minister of West Bengal who was a Middle Temple barrister; Sh. Somnath Chatterjee, a former Speaker of the Lok Sabha, also a Middle Temple barrister and a leading member of the Calcutta Bar Library; and Justice Chittotosh Mookerjee, a former Chief Justice of the Calcutta High Court and the Bombay High Court and the Acting Governor of Maharashtra. Justice Mookerjee was the university's Honorary Treasurer and has been associated with the university's work since its inception in 1999. The NUJS is an autonomous university. Initially, classes, which started in 2000, were held at Aranya Bhavan, where the Environment Ministry of the government of West Bengal is located, and the first batches of students started living in government flats.