The Bench and the Bar

Arguments continued by the appellants in the Kerala liquor ban case Kerala Bar Hotels Association vs State of Kerala for the second day on August 18 in the Supreme Court’s Court No. 11, with senior advocates, Harish Salve and N Venkataraman making a determined attempt to expose the State Government’s “discriminatory” liquor policy.

The PTI reported the law ministry releasing data that:

according to the latest data compiled by the Law Ministry, as on [1 August], the high courts were facing a shortage of 384 judges as against the approved strength of 1017. Thus, the 24 high courts are functioning with a working strength of 633 judges.

As on [1 May], there was a shortage of 366 judges in the high courts.

The Supreme Court is currently deliberating whether the National Judicial Appointments Commission (NJAC) is constitutional. In the meantime, new appointments to high courts have effectively been stalled.

In the wake of the bar’s stand-off with the Supreme Court bench, the Supreme Court Bar Association (SCBA) of the “committee to oversee implementation of suggestions by SCBA” and a letter by SCBA president Dushyant Dave.

After in August 2013 banning interns from its premises on Mondays and Fridays - miscellaneous days - in order to fight overcrowding, the Supreme Court now plans to ban interns from entering the “high security” zone inside the court for security reasons.

Ex-Medical Council of India (MCI) president Dr Ketan Desai is facing a Supreme Court probe into all manner of allegations into the future of the profession’s regulator.

The apex consumer court on Monday served a notice on Nestle India over the government’s Rs.640-crore unfair trade practice class action suit related to Maggi noodles and fixed 30 September as the next date of hearing.

The Delhi high court will soon transfer thousands of cases, mostly related to property disputes, to the district courts of the capital as the President has signed into law a bill which enhances the pecuniary jurisdiction of civil courts.

Arguments in The Kerala Bar Hotels Association vs State of Kerala began with a lot of excitement on both sides last week before the bench of justices Viramajit Sen and Shiva Kirti Singh.

[https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/08/11/surveillance-philosopher-nsa The Intercept wrote a compelling investigation in *What Happens When a Failed Writer Becomes a Loyal Spy?*, based on the Edward Snowden NSA leaks, about modern-day privacy and its implications told through the lens of finding the identity of the NSA's in-house philosopher:

“I found myself wishing that my life would be constantly and completely monitored,” he continued. “It might seem odd that a self-professed libertarian would wish an Orwellian dystopia on himself, but here was my rationale: If people knew a few things about me, I might seem suspicious. But if people knew everything about me, they’d see they had nothing to fear. This is the attitude I have brought to SIGINT work since then.

”When intelligence officials justify surveillance, they tend to use the stilted language of national security, and we typically hear only from senior officials who stick to their platitudes. It is rare for mid-level experts — the ones conducting the actual surveillance — to frankly explain what they do and why. And in this case, the candid confessions come from the NSA’s own surveillance philosopher. The columns answer a sociological curiosity: How does working at an intelligence agency turn a privacy hawk into a prophet of eavesdropping?

Two weeks after Bar Council of India (BCI) chairman Manan Kumar Mishra had said at an event that 30 per cent of lawyers were "fake", held "fraudulent degrees" or were "non-practising" but still on the rolls, the government's Press Information Bureau (PIB) reported yesterday that the BCI told the government that "the number of fake lawyers cannot be exactly ascertained by now".