The Bench and the Bar

The retirement age for high court judges should be increased from 62 to 65 to match the current retirement age of Supreme Court judges, argues former solicitor general of India TR Andhyarujina. For Supreme Court judges it should, in turn, be raised to 70 to match the international standard, he adds.

“With no logic, the Constitution-makers had a poor notion of the fitness of High Court judges after 60, but a higher notion of the competence of Supreme Court judges after 60, for whom they prescribed retirement at 65,” he says.

He asserts that early retirement age is a disincentive to lawyers to take up the judicial post, takes away the opportunity from judges to acquire “maturity, learning and experience”, and increases their anxiety to look for alternate employment after retirement, also high court judges then tend to “unbecomingly” covet Supreme Court judgeships.

Australia, Ireland, Israel and South Africa retire their SC judges at 70 while the US prescribes no retirement age. A US judge Blackmum served until the age of 85 while chief justice Rehnquist served till death at 80. [The Hindu]

Exclusive: Pharmaceutical company Natco has filed in the Delhi high court against intellectual property (IP) blog SpicyIP, claiming that the website published an article that allegedly contained “false, derogatory and defamatory” statements about the company.

Exclusive: Senior counsel Paras Kuhad, who founded Paras Kuhad & Associates, and senior counsel Rakesh Khanna have accepted appointments to become additional solicitor general (ASG) in the Supreme Court.

Bombay high court judges SA Bobde and RG Ketkar suddenly, and mysteriously, recuse themselves from hearing the Adarsh housing society petitions against 13 retired bureaucrats, politicians and defence personnel, for alleged money laundering. They had been hearing the matter for several months now.

“Not before us”, the bench tells senior advocate Amit Desai who was arguing the case for quashing charges against former Maharashtra chief minister Ashok Chavan. The bench offers no explanation for the recusal [The Hindu]

Eastern Book Company (EBC), which publishes Indian case reports in its Supreme Court Cases (SCC) offering, won a temporary ex parte injunction in a Lucknow district court last week, restraining New York-based multinational Thomson Reuters from selling and distributing its allegedly infringing India-focused legal research products Westlaw and Indlaw. Thomson Reuters denied any infringement.

The Supreme Court reaffirmed the death sentence upheld by the Bombay High Court in February 2011 against Ajmal Amir Kasab, one of the gunmen in the 26/11 Mumbai terrorism attack that killed 166.

The bench of justices Aftab Alam and CK Prasasd said: “Ajmal Kasab's act is very much an act of waging a war against India. We are left with no option but to uphold the death sentence of Kasab.” Senior advocate Raju Ramachandran argued as amicus curiae on behalf of Kasab, contending that he was not given a fair trial, was not part of a larger conspiracy of waging war against India that the prosecution failed to prove their case beyond doubt, and that his right to self-incrimination and adequate representation had been violated at trial. [Firstpost / IBNLive]

Before the death sentence will be carried out, Kasab now has the option of filing a mercy petition before the President of India, who would first have to dispose of 20 other mercy petitions with one dating back to 2001, before dealing with Kasab’s [Rediff]

Full judgment available on SC website.

Forbes does a profile of Chief Justice of India (CJI) SH Kapadia, gathering a remarkable biography from eating Bombay Chana at Flora Fountain as a class IV employee at Bombay HC, to the breeze in BHC’s courtroom number 3 and his hard-working rise to judge, a special court judge, the chief justice of the Uttaranchal HC, a judge of the SC and, finally, CJI.

“A judge, by virtue of his chosen profession, chooses to become an ascetic, distant from the society he lives in, yet immersed in it so deep that he is confronted with the rawness of its existential struggle every day,” says Kapadia, who keeps himself “hermetically sealed” from society “in his pursuit of flawless integrity”, reports Forbes.

Unsurprisingly, the magazine was denied an interview with the judge but retired justice VR Krishna Iyer tells Forbes he’d gathered that Kapadia was too dignified to even meet other judges.

Much before filling the chair of the chief’s court at SC on 12 May 2010, Kapadia had a landmark judgement associated with his name. In 1982, while practicing at the Bombay bar he fought a case leading to settlement of the legal principle that governments cannot invoke summary eviction laws to throw out people when there is a genuine dispute on the title.

Soli Sorabjee says that litigants return satisfied for being “fully and fairly” heard in Kapadia’s court, even if they lose the case. To fully understand an environmental dispute once, Kapadia made arguing counsel Harish Salve turn the courtroom into a classroom for environmental jurisprudence for seven Fridays in a row.

Feathers in his cap include the disposal of 39 matters within his first half-hour as CJI, streamlining the SC registry so that the much abused practice of “bench-hunting” and “out-of-turn-case-mentioning” became obsolete, the stoppage of illegal mining in Bellary district, disqualification of a wrongly appointed central vigilance commissioner, and the Vodafone judgement [Forbes India | Also see Court Witness’ Sarosh ‘Hercules’ Kapadia’s mid-term appraisal from 2011 (TBC…)]

Senior counsel Harish Salve’s 22 minute interview with Bloomberg TV India by @thecourtroom1. Pretty tame stuff, but interesting and Salve on top form [YouTube]

@courtwitness tweets: Admire how neatly @hsalve collapses “corporates” & “citizen” when talking about mistrust of decisions | But completely agree with @hsalve on the directionless, headless-chicken-ish Govt. of the day | So @hsalve's idea of governance is MBAs making presentations to govt. officers who take rapid decisions justifiable by sr counsel in courts

Agree with Salve / CourtWitness / the government? Share your views...

The Olympics are here once again. It is that time of the year when people around you start talking about sports no one has ever heard of and will never mention again for another four years.

For two whole weeks people will pore keenly over the progression of world records in discus throwing, the fitness of horses in the equestrian events and how the Koreans are essentially unbeatable in women’s archery. Then we can all go back to obsessing over cricket.

But in the spirit of things, I would like to take this opportunity to introduce to the public a little known but fairly widely played sport called “The Adjournment Game”.

Exclusive: The Bar Council of India’s (BCI) demonstration on 8 August has been indefinitely postponed because talks were ongoing between the lawyers’ regulator and the government, the Delhi high court was told today, disposing of the writ petition of advocate Anoop Prakash Awasthi against the BCI.

Exclusive: The Delhi high court issued notice to the Bar Council of India (BCI) to explain how it would continue with its proposed agitation against the Higher Education and Research (HER) Bill 2011, with the BCI having taken police permission for a Dharna in Jantar Mantar on 8 August.

Exclusive: Advocate Anoop Prakash Awasthi’s contempt of court petition against several senior members of the Bar Council of India (BCI) and the Delhi bar council will be heard tomorrow by the Delhi high court’s chief justice.

Awasthi claims that the BCI’s nationwide two-day strike against the Higher Education and Research Bill 2011 violated an earlier Supreme Court order restricting lawyers going on strike.

Exclusive: The Bar Council of India (BCI) and the Human Resources Development (HRD) have continued being at loggerheads over the Higher Education and Research Bill 2011 (HER Bill), which eventually culminated in a two-day strike last week, as recent correspondence from HRD minister Kapil Sibal revealed limited communication between the warring parties.

Exclusive: Advocate Anoop Prakash Awasthi’s writ challenging the Bar Council of India’s (BCI) two-day strike against the Higher Education and Research Bill 2011 was not taken up by the Delhi high court yesterday.

However, Awasthi vowed to bring contempt of court proceedings tomorrow against bar council members for violating an earlier Supreme Court judgment banning two-day strikes by lawyers.

Exclusive: Right to Information (RTI) activist and advocate Anoop Prakash Awasthi filed a writ petition before the Delhi high court today, challenging the two-day nationwide lawyers’ strike called by the Bar Council of India (BCI) for 11 and 12 July 2012 to oppose the Higher Education and Research Bill 2011.

Exclusive: Supreme Court senior advocate Sidharth Luthra has today accepted his appointment to become additional solicitor general (ASG).