The Bench and the Bar

"We have a constitutional, political, legal and social amnesia about the horrors that accompanied our founding," argued Supreme Court lawyer and Yale Law School visiting faculty Menaka Guruswamy persuasively in Scroll, about the death and bloodshed of the India Pakistan partition of 1947 that saw millions displaced and between 0.5 million and 2 million dead, according to various estimates.

The Increasing Diversity by Increasing Access (IDIA) legal education NGO helped 60 scholars prepare for law entrance exams this year and eight of those made it to NUJS Kolkata, Nalsar Hyderabad, GNLU Gandhinagar, NLU Orissa and Nuals Kochi, in the first allotment list of the Common Law Admission Test (CLAT) 2016.

>The Delhi high court on Monday pulled up Delhi University (DU) for delay in completion of the new building for its law students. A bench of Justice Sanjiv Khanna and Justice Najmi Waziri gave time till 28 June for the university to ensure all infrastructure, including furniture in the new building, was ready so that students could shift in the coming academic session. The court cautioned DU to meet the deadline, while authorising the Bar Council of India (BCI) to conduct a thorough inspection of the new building a week after 28 June.<

>We are back to the intolerance of challenge. The Lawyers Collective posed no political challenge to the NDA, it cannot, but it seems that there is an intolerance of legal challenge within the NDA <

Only a handful of cases have been listed every day before the vacation bench of the Supreme Court in the first two weeks of the summer break which began on May 16, belying the strong criticism of the apex court and its judges for a seven-week summer holiday.

via Times of India

An Ola cab driver has been arrested for molesting a judge, police said on Thursday.

The Bar Council of India’s (BCI) chairman Manan Kumar Mishra has responded to our request for comment on the news that the BCI had again amended bylaws to prescribe law schools to buy the All India Reporter’s (AIR) products, despite protests from vice chancellors and having agreed two years ago that such a requirement to buy from a single vendor was unfair.

There are now “about 20 lakh” lawyers in India, according to Bar Council of India chairman Manan Kumar Mishra. The BCI’s data on lawyers’ verification has revealed that Delhi has the maximum number of “fake” lawyers.

Lawyers Collective (LC) – the NGO founded by senior advocates and spouses Indira Jaising and Anand Grover – responded to the home ministry’s 6-month ban order on it receiving foreign funds, by claiming that the ban order was “a malafide act and an act of vindictiveness on the part of the Government” against which the NGO had fought several cases.

After 14 long years, a special Gujarat sessions court today convicted 24 people, including Vishwa Hindu Parishad leader Atul Vaidya, in the sensational Gulbarg massacre case in which 69 people, including former Congress MP Ehsan Jafri, were burnt alive on 28 February, 2002.

The Delhi high court today implemented the 'one bar one vote' principle across all the courts in national capital, which means an advocate in Delhi can vote only once in one bar association, regardless of his or her multiple bar association memberships.

“Bar associations are facing a very serious identity crisis and good lawyers are unfortunately not willing to participate in the democratic process in bar associations. As a result, most bar association have been hijacked by those lawyers who don't have a serious stake in the institution or those who have a personal agenda, but not the welfare of the bar.”

Former Australia and New Zealand (ANZ) Banking Group’s India lead counsel Simrata Gujral joined JP Morgan’s Asia Pacific corporate and institutional banking (CIB) Legal Team as assistant general counsel.

Imprisoned for 23 years on the basis of faked police confessions, finally exonerated earlier this month by Supreme Court justices Fakkir Mohamed Ibrahim Kalifulla and Justice UU Lalit, Nisar-ud-din Ahmad, and four others were released reported The Indian Express in a harrowing story that should be read in full and will probably end in one asking, is it too little too late?

The Supreme Court on Friday refused to stay the NEET ordinance, saying that its validity on the ground it violated Article 14 of the constitution could be challenged when the court opened after the summer break.

The Supreme Court was moved on Thursday, challenging the NEET ordinance exempting Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Gujarat, Maharashtra and Punjab for this year from the ambit of National Eligibility Entrance Test (NEET) for medical colleges.