Bar, Bench & Litigation

Bar Council of India (BCI) chairman Manan Kumar Mishra has called for a nationwide lawyers’ strike on 31 March after meeting with Delhi bar associations, Live Law reported Mishra as saying yesterday.

The Law Commission, headed by chairman and former Supreme Court judge Justice BS Chauhan, has released its draft Advocates Act (Amendment) Bill 2017, including proposals by the Bar Council of India (BCI) and other stakeholders after the Commission was tasked by the Supreme Court to look at the BCI’s failure to do its statutory duty of regulating the profession.

And here’s one of the problems with the opaque collegium and judiciary, which rarely if ever officially confirms anything to journalists, leaving reporting on the bench to often be sourced on hints and whispers.

Bar Council of India (BCI) chairman Manan Kumar Mishra wrote to the Law Commission yesterday, withdrawing the BCI resolution that had recommended a ban on lawyer strikes and heavy fines for professional misconduct, after possibly up to 4,000 lawyers marched to the BCI office demanding Mishra’s resignation.

The Delhi Bar Association (DBA), in what it claims would be a delegation of “thousands of lawyers”, plans to march from Rohini district court to the Bar Council of India (BCI) office tomorrow (23 March) demanding the resignation of BCI chairman Manan Kumar Mishra over Mishra’s resolution that seeks to fine lawyers heavily for professional misconduct.

Bar Council of India (BCI) chairman Manan Kumar Mishra has posted an update on his official Facebook page threatening that “lawyers will come on roads” if the Law Commission were to recommend that a new regulator should handle disciplinary complaints against advocates.

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100 cops, led by the West Bengal police chief, are currently at the doors of Calcutta high court Justice CS Karnan to enforce the Supreme Court’s arrest warrant against him for contempt of court, reported NDTV, after Karnan yesterday sent another letter to the seven most senior apex court judges claiming Rs 14 crore in compensation from them for having “disturbed my mind and my normal life”.

A petition filed by advocate Ashwini Kumar Upadhyay in the apex court is arguing that legislators should cease practising law because it gives rise to conflict between their duty to client and to the constitution, seeking to extend the restriction that exists on public servants and judges to carry out professions to elected parliamentarians, reported The Hindu:

Senior counsel Dushyant Dave, writing in The Wire, has criticised a number of recent decisions of the Supreme Court regarding judicial elevations and transfers, for having been as opaque (as ever) and having missed out on obvious candidates, suggesting that executive pressure scuppered the elevations of several judges who’d handed down decisions the government wouldn’t have liked.

The Supreme Court collegium has finally completed its year-long-awaited draft of the memorandum of procedure (MOP), which would govern how judges are appointed in future, reported the The Times of India’s Dhananjay Mahapatra earlier today:

The Singapore International Arbitration Centre (SIAC) has seen a two-third increase in new cases filed in 2016 involving Indian parties, with India remaining the largest overseas jurisdiction to adjudicate in Singapore, way ahead of China.

Justice Gautam Patel, who had written a hugely sarcastic, hard-hitting and viral order targeting adjournment culture, has passed a new order expressing his “personal regret” if any embarrassment was caused the the junior counsel appearing before him, clarifying that it should have been directed at those who given the instructions to seek an adjournment.

The Bar Council of India (BCI) has quietly but significantly changed the All India Bar Exam (AIBE) syllabus since last time, possibly making it quite a bit harder, wrote iPleaders co-founder Abhyuday Aggarwal on Live Law yesterday.

For the first time, NLU Delhi’s Centre on the Death Penalty has analysed death penalties across lower courts and released a report, which suggests a picture in which the judiciary ordering a convict killed seems more subject to randomness than an evolving jurisprudence or overarching policy.