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Top 10:
Kanga
Ambedkar
Munshi
Palhivala
Nambyar
Nariman
Venugopal
Sorabjee
Parasaran
Iqbal Chagla
These Monday-Friday lawyers from Delhi will never feature. Nor will Jethmalani
Nabam Rebia, Kihoto Hollohan, 2nd judges case, SR Bommai, V Ramaswamy, K Veeraswamy, Art 370, Waqf Case, Electoral Bonds, KS Puttaswamy, AMU Minority Status, Jain Hawala including defending Lal Krishna Advani in the same case, Maharashtra political crisis case, PMLA challenge, Same sex marriage, Triple Talaq, Whatsapp privacy case, Ram Mandir case, Bihar SIR, Yashwant Verma.
And don't get me started on the no. people he got bail for. Some names are Kanhaiya Kumar, P Chidambaram, Karti Chidambaram, Sanjay Dutt, Subrata Roy Sahara, Hemant Soren etc.
These are some of the cases that I can remember and there must be many. Tell me one lawyer worth his name who has argued cases of such importance.
You might not agree with the stand that he takes but must give the man the credit for being the no. 1 lawyer of our times.
Supreme court used to be dominated by Lawyers from Bombay and Madras. Kapil became Delhi bars' first lawyer of some importance in the Supreme Court. He left behind Jethmalani, Nariman, Divan, Sorabjee etc in 90s itself and virtually became the no. 1 sr. In the late 90s.
Infact Jethmalani asked him to argue Sanjay Dutt's bail petition after failing repeatedly to get Sanjay out. Sibal got him bail but the whole credit was take by Ram Jethmalani and Satish Maneshinde. Kapil defended LK Advani including Jain brothers in the Jain Hawala case but again Jethmalani took credit of LK Adavni's aquittal. Lawyers like Salve and Jaitley used to brief Kapil in their younger days and Sibal was just 5-7 yrs older to them.
Lastly, if you remove the recent political cases, his body of work isnt as great on seminal matters in past. And all these matters are again muti counsel matters. Eg Electoral bonds case really was led by Prashant Bhushan, Article 370 has a huge list of counsel, in fact Raju Ramachandran was instrumental in it getting to Constitution bench, Ayodhya had so many seniors with Rajiv Dhavan really leading and so on. So honestly, is he good, yes. Very good - i think he's now arguing matters for causes which resonate with him or where he feels strongly about and some part of his advocacy now contains a bit of his outrage on what he sees as wrong (as opposed to say Dr. AMS, who's laser focused on points of law and not passionate arguments). Alltime - honestly, no. Had he not been in Government, probably he would have done much more legal work and that credit needs to be given to him.
2. Kanga
3. Rashbehari Ghose
4. MC Chagla
5. Iqbal Chagla
6. Ashok Sen
7. Soli Sorabjee
8. SS Ray
9. Barry Sen
10. FD Mulla
11. NA Palkhiwala
12. Sir SM Bose
13. FS Nariman
14. Rohinton Nariman
15. Niren De
16. Ashok Desai
17. Sir Asutosh Mukherjee
18. NC Chatterjee
19. MC Setalvad
20. CK Dapthary
In no particular order, I mentioned a few names that came to me who are well known from the Calcutta and Bombay Bar of the yesteryears. Each of them, regardless of who they supported or what they did [SS Ray and Niren De for emergency, for example], they were the doyens of the Bar, for entire India. Each of them, barring very few, would have travelled all over India or substantially all over, aside from their parent HC, and the supreme court/federal court/privy council. You think he can be anywhere near them? Maybe you'd remove the names of a few, sure. But still Top 10? I don't think so.
Most of the people on this forum including myself were not even born when he already became a Senior Advocate.
How many lawyers in India can you tell that have defended a judge in a parliament.