Bar, Bench & Litigation

Supreme Court Insider: From the start of the trial in the 2G spectrum scam case, the prime accused and main conspirator, former telecom minister A Raja, started a silent protest.

Exclusive: 71 advocates out of around 400 test takers have passed the June 2011 advocates-on-record (AOR) examination, making them part of the oligopoly of at least 1,000 advocates who can file petitions before the Supreme Court. However, the Delhi High Court has now taken up a writ challenging the AOR system and has approached the apex court for guidance.

More than two thirds of cases pending in the Supreme Court – nearly 40,000 – were stuck not because of judges but due to procedural delays, including unpaid fees, unserved notice or documents not filed by counsel, according to detailed data released for the first time by the court as a result of its exercise in cataloguing court delays.

Earlier this week, Court Witness thought he impressed his client by predicting the bench who would hear his treasured special leave petition (SLP), which learned to walk last week after having been nurtured since birth by CW.

CW and client then conspired to put together a winning team of eminent senior counsel and junior senior counsel (from the same state as the judge) to make sure the SLP had a good start to its life. Now the SLP is ready to go to school… Hopefully a good one.

In last month’s column, Court Witness described the labour pains of giving birth to a special leave petition (SLP). But after filing successfully with the goblin-like clerk Bakshi-ji the real work of raising an SLP was apparently only just beginning – now it needs to start taking its first steps...

The Supreme Court saw the backlog of cases increase by another 80 in a slow holiday-ridden October where almost 3,000 fewer cases were filed than in the previous month. However, in more positive news the apex court has managed to continue its now four-month record of getting cases older than one year off its books.

“Follow me,” said the man with the purple hair as he walked through the open doors into the corridor awash in gloomy, fluorescent light.

Exclusive: Supreme Court journalists and the bench are understood to have agreed a compromise after the spat over the notification of rules in late August that would have effectively excluded 80 per cent of current correspondents from the apex court.

Exclusive: The Bar Council of Maharashtra and Goa has set up a society to advance micro-loans to advocates as lawyers fight back against banks’ “unwritten code” that denies credit cards and loans to lawyers.

Former Delhi High Court chief justice Dipak Misra and Kerala High Court chief justice Jasti Chelameswar have been sworn into the apex court today.

Former solicitor general Gopal Subramanium has been appointed to represent the Maharashtra government and the Central Bureau of Investigations (CBI) as special counsel.

Bad news: in September 2011 the Supreme Court booked an apparent net deficit of more than 1,000 cases in its monthly pendency clearance efforts. If this rate were kept up, pending cases could double in less than five years.

Justice Markandey Katju, who retired from the Supreme Court just over two weeks ago, is set to become chairman of the Press Council of India (PCI).

Congress Party spokesperson and senior lawyer Abhishek Manu Singhvi hosted a dinner for the upper echelons of the legal fraternity in Delhi on Saturday night. Found wining and dining at the seemingly non-descript but ultra-high profile occasion were judges of the Supreme Court and Delhi High Court, senior advocates and well-connected lawyers from the Delhi-Bombay Bar.

Read on to find out what happened.

Kochhar & Co has filed police information reports (FIRs) against websites including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Sulekha, MSN and others that allegedly hosted “defamatory and objectionable material” against Congress party general secretary Digvijay Singh.