Straight from the Bar

This week, we intend to address a fairly sombre issue: the death penalty (and we don’t mean the punishments by pollution all those in Delhi have been undergoing). As a result, there will be no crass jokes about how chokers are in fashion these days. We will also avoid jokes about how hanging unto death could make our eyes pop better than Loreal eyeliner.

The House of Cards playing out in Maharashtra has left a lot of us very confused about the role and functioning of the Governor.

The big news at the Supreme Court over the past couple of weeks, apart from the land dispute over the birthplace of India’s greatest ever engineer, has been the a bevvy of collegium appointments, including four new Supreme Court judges and a lot of new high court chief justices (and a whole lot more who didn’t make the cut).

It would perhaps be anti-national to begin any column about the events of the last month without addressing the elephant in the room (the State in the Nation, wait it’s a Union Territory now). L

The Rajasthan High Court recently issued a directive that lawyers should not address judges as ‘Your Lordship’ and ‘My Lord’. We went about asking senior lawyers in Bombay about the desirability for pushing for a similar rule here. A number of interesting responses, on the condition of anonymity, followed.