legal reform
AAP law minister calls for judicial reforms opposed: Somnath Bharti called for a meeting of Delhi’s district judges to encourage reforms but he was faced with opposition in the house and a letter to Delhi HC chief justice NV Ramana from Delhi principal law secretary AS Yadav, who said he saw it as an attack on the independence of the judiciary [PTI]
Madras HC advocates crowded the HC’s chief justice’s chambers yesterday, shouting slogans against the 12 names recommended for judgeships in the HC [TOI]
SC advocate HS Phololka joins AAP: Phololka, who is spearheading the 1984 riot victims’ case, is joining the political party Aam Aadmi Party whose leaders Arvind Kejriwal, Shanti Bhushan and Manish Sisodia contributed in the mission to get justice for the riot victims, at various times [TOI]
The Law Ministry’s National Mission for Justice Delivery and Legal Reforms comprising of the law minister and bureaucrats as members of the advisory and governing councils has received the government’s approval with an estimated Rs 7,000 crore ($1.56bn) earmarked for lower judiciary infrastructure development over five years.
Law minister Veerappa Moily admitted that the entry of foreign firms could be good for business if local lawyers were allowed to build capacity before an “onslaught from the rest of the world” and that he had seen 80 national law school graduates prosper at London firms, in a revealing interview with the Mint paper today, adding that the door was still open to transfer the Chennai writ petition against foreign firms to the Supreme Court.
Arguing that legal education should be taken away from the BCI, he denied that the Bar Council of India (BCI) should feel threatened by the Legal Practitioner’s Bill.
he Bar Council of India's (BCI) ambitious weekend meeting decided to introduce draft lawyers' ethics guidelines in two days and how to begin decreasing the number of law colleges in India. But due to time constraints the body had to postpone its decision on the entry of foreign law firms in respect of the Chennai writ petition, as well as Trilegal's queries about converting to a limited liability partnership (LLP).
Bar Council of India (BCI) chairman Gopal Subramanium said in a Legally India interview that he wants to reduce the number of Indian law colleges from 913 to 175 within a year as part of an ambitious overhaul of the legal profession's regulation and education that will be announced this Thursday (15 July).
The current law minister has talked often about cutting the backlog of cases in India, perhaps more consistently than many before him.
India's minister of law and justice Veerappa Moily unveiled a "national litigation policy" today under which the government "must cease to be a compulsive litigant" by creating a new layer of supervisory bureaucracy, reducing appeals and reviewing all existing cases, while tightening legal panels and increasing fees of lawyers representing the government.