The Bench and the Bar

Four members of civil society, represented by Supreme Court advocate KV Dhananjay, have filed a writ petition in the Karnataka high court praying that a Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) investigation be started against the Lokayukta of Karnataka, Y Bhaskar Rao and his son Ashwin Y Rao, who are being investigated for corruption charges by the Lokayukta’s internal police force.

One of the many things that lawyers practising at the supreme and high courts hate most about the filing process is curing defects in the paperbooks.

Justice Aniruddha Bose created history today when Calcutta high court room 24, outfitted with a permanent video camera and microphone for the occasion, recorded the proceedings of advocate Deepak Khosla, which Khosla claims is the first time this has happened in a high court.

After Subramanian Swamy and PP Rao began arguing yesterday in the multi-petitioner challenge of sections 499 and 500 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC), Swamy, senior counsel Rao and Rajeev Dhavan today continued their arguments.

Thousands of lawyers in Bihar on Wednesday abstained from work, protesting against the lack of initiative by the Patna High Court on their demand to allow unrestricted entry of vigilance officials into the premises of subordinate courts.

Their demand was in order to curb the prevailing corruption in the judicial system.

The Bihar State Bar Council (BSBC) appealed to all advocates from district and subdivisional courts, tribunals as well as those practising at the Patna High Court to abstain from court work on July 15, said Akhouri Mangla Charan Srivastava, chairman of BSBC

He said that the protest hit most courts including the Patna High Court.

“Our strike was very effective,” Srivastava said.

The process of appointing senior advocates is broken and no one has bothered to fix it, until now.

The hearings in the Subramaniam Swamy v Union of India case began today, with Swamy, alongside several other petitioners, seeking to get the Supreme Court to strike down section 499 and 500 of the Indian Penal Code. This is what happened.

The Supreme Court Bar Association (SCBA) has published on its website a list of 111 lawyers with between 0 and 30 years of experience, in a bid to encourage more senior lawyers who are looking for associates or junior lawyers to contact those job seekers directly.

Candidates for the controversial 2014 Delhi Judicial Service (DJS) exam have painstakingly cross-referenced a list of offspring and others close to Delhi high court judges against the 15 who passed the DJS exams, received a surprising RTI response, and established that 64 judges who had passed or topped judicial services exams in other states, failed in last year's DJS exam outright.