The Bench and the Bar

The censor board on Friday told the Bombay high court that some of the scenes recommended for deletion in the Hindi movie "Udta Punjab" were "very vulgar".

Prashant Reddy reviews the major decisions of Justice Manmohan Singh of the Delhi high court (mostly) in the field of IP law, in the first of a series of posts that will mull on what criteria should be considered in appointing persons to the position of chairperson of the Intellectual Property Appellate Board (IPAB).

Read more on Spicy IP.

Naik Naik & Company managing partner Ameet Naik with senior advocate Ravi Kadam acted for Phantom Films in their Bombay high court appeal against the censor board’s decision to ban the film Udta Punjab.

The Bar Council of India (BCI) has been a victim of the “sinister game” of a “mischief doer” who forged the BCI’s ‘LIFT’ restrictions notice that went viral on Saturday, BCI chairman Manan Kumar Mishra told Legally India via email.

The heavy backlog of cases and delays in the Indian judicial system are once again the topic of much discussion, with everything from government callousness to over-litigiousness to judicial activism being blamed for the 35 million cases pending in the courts at all levels.

"Highly-placed sources in the government said today that in November, 2013 the collegium had recommended appointing a member of the state judicial services as additional judge to the Patna High Court. But the government had then returned the file to the collegium requesting it to "reconsider" the decision. The government's move was based on an Intelligence Bureau report," reported the PTI.

The Madras High Court Advocates Association (MHAA) registered its protest against the Advocates Act amendment that enables the high court to debar errant lawyers, by leading a 5000 person rally, reported the Deccan Chronicle.

In November 2013 the Bar Council of India (BCI) amended its Legal Education Rules 2008 and, for years following that (as reported by us last week), has been sending repeated letters to law schools, telling them it was obligatory to buy lakhs worth of products of the All India Reporter (AIR).

A special sessions court, which was to pronounce the quantum of sentence for those convicted of the massacre of 69 people at the Gulberg Housing Society here in 2002, on Monday put off its decision to 9 June with the arguments still continuing in the case.

A judge of the Kerala high court on Monday said he was offered money to influence his judgement in a smuggling case.

The Bar Council of India (BCI) chairman Manan Kumar Mishra will deduct one day’s salary from BCI staff “below the rank of assistant secretary” and “sweepers or other outsourced employees” who are caught using lifts at the BCI’s Rouse Avenue office in Delhi.

"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