UGC NET Law Paper 2: How to Work Out Unit Wise Weightage

UGC NET Law Paper 2 has 100 questions of 2 marks each, drawn from a syllabus of ten units. The NTA syllabus does not publish a fixed number of questions per unit, so the reliable way to find weightage is to build it yourself: tag every question in the last several years of papers by unit, count them, and divide your study time in proportion to those counts and to your own weak areas. This guide shows how.

The ten units

The UGC syllabus for Law (subject code 058) lists these units for Paper 2. Check the exact wording on the NTA or UGC site, since coaching sites sometimes shorten the titles.

1. Jurisprudence
2. Constitutional and Administrative Law
3. Public International Law and International Humanitarian Law
4. Law of Crimes
5. Law of Torts and Consumer Protection
6. Commercial Law
7. Family Law
8. Environment Law and Human Rights Law
9. Intellectual Property Rights and Information Technology Law
10. Comparative Public Law

Paper 2 carries 100 questions for 200 marks. Paper 1 is a separate general paper with 50 questions for 100 marks. The two are written together in a three hour session, and there is no negative marking. Confirm the pattern in the latest NTA information bulletin.

What can and cannot be said about weightage

You will find coaching sites and videos that give percentage tables for each unit. These are the authors’ own counts of past questions and they differ because the papers are not always labelled by unit, and because many questions touch two units (for example, a question on the Right to Life in an environment context sits between Constitutional Law and Environment Law). No unit has a published quota. A study plan should therefore not assume that a unit will have a particular number of questions; it should assume that all ten can appear in strength and that the spread can change from one sitting to the next.

The method

Step 1: collect papers

Download the NET Law Paper 2 question papers for the last five to eight sittings from the NTA website or the official archive. Where only memory-based papers are available for some shifts, mark them as less reliable. Official answer keys settle disputes about which option is correct.

Step 2: tag every question

Make a spreadsheet with these columns: sitting, question number, unit, topic, question type (direct recall, statement based, assertion and reason, match the lists, chronological), difficulty (easy, medium, hard) and whether you got it right when you attempted it. Tag each question by the unit whose syllabus text mentions the topic. If a question could fit two units, choose the one where the topic is first listed in the syllabus, and note the second in a comment.

Step 3: count by unit and sitting

Create a pivot of questions per unit per sitting. Look at the range, not just the average. If a unit appeared 6 times in one sitting and 14 times in another, plan for volatility.

Step 4: count by topic inside the unit

This is where weightage becomes useful. Inside Constitutional and Administrative Law you will see which topics are repeated: fundamental rights, writs, federalism, administrative tribunals, and so on. Inside Law of Crimes you will notice general principles, specific offences and, since 2024, the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita and the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita.

Step 5: weight by your own score

For each unit, compute a priority score. A simple one is: past frequency (a number from 1 to 5) multiplied by your weakness (1 for strong, 3 for weak). Units with a high score get more time. This keeps you from over-studying a heavy unit that you already know well and under-studying a lighter unit where you lose marks.

Step 6: convert to study hours

If you have 100 hours for revision, allocate them in proportion to the priority scores, then reserve a fixed block (say 20 per cent) for Paper 1 and for mock tests.

Adjusting for changes in law

NET Law questions increasingly test current law: the new criminal codes, amendments to the Consumer Protection Act, 2019, data protection law, and recent Supreme Court judgments. If you build your tags from older papers, add a column for “affected by recent change” and revise those topics from current sources. The syllabus is the boundary, but questions about the latest law inside a syllabus topic are fair.

Balance within a unit

• Jurisprudence: thinkers and schools are repeated; learn them as a chart of thinker, school, key idea and book.
• Constitutional and Administrative Law: Articles, landmark cases and amendments; also doctrines of administrative law.
• Public International Law: sources, treaties, state responsibility, the law of the sea, and humanitarian law conventions.
• Law of Crimes: general principles, offences and the BNS and BNSS mapping.
• Torts and Consumer Protection: principles of liability and the structure of the Consumer Protection Act, 2019.
• Commercial Law: contract, sale of goods, partnership, negotiable instruments, companies and competition law as the syllabus lists them.
• Family Law: personal laws on marriage, divorce, maintenance, succession and adoption.
• Environment and Human Rights: statutes, principles and institutions.
• IPR and IT Law: the main IP statutes and the Information Technology Act, 2000.
• Comparative Public Law: constitutions of other countries and comparative concepts.

Checking your weightage with mocks

Mock tests are useful for the second half of this method, which is measuring yourself unit by unit. Lexfolio’s UGC NET Law Mock Tests is described on its product page as four 100 question Paper 2 mocks with ten questions per unit in each mock and an explanation for each answer, plus a score tracker. That even split means the mocks measure how you perform in each unit, rather than imitating the NTA’s distribution, which the page does not claim to match. Use your own tagged past papers to set the proportions and the mocks to test the result.

A weightage table is a planning tool, not a prediction. Update it after every sitting, and keep a little time for every unit.