Supreme Court

One of the many things that lawyers practising at the supreme and high courts hate most about the filing process is curing defects in the paperbooks.

After Subramanian Swamy and PP Rao began arguing yesterday in the multi-petitioner challenge of sections 499 and 500 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC), Swamy, senior counsel Rao and Rajeev Dhavan today continued their arguments.

The process of appointing senior advocates is broken and no one has bothered to fix it, until now.

The hearings in the Subramaniam Swamy v Union of India case began today, with Swamy, alongside several other petitioners, seeking to get the Supreme Court to strike down section 499 and 500 of the Indian Penal Code. This is what happened.

The Supreme Court Bar Association (SCBA) has published on its website a list of 111 lawyers with between 0 and 30 years of experience, in a bid to encourage more senior lawyers who are looking for associates or junior lawyers to contact those job seekers directly.

Politics are in full swing at the SCBA again after yesterday’s meeting.

Defamation will no longer be a jailable offence under which journalists may be charged for their reportage, if the Foundation of Media Professionals’ (FMP) constitutional challenge to India’s criminal defamation provisions wins in the Supreme Court.

LiveLaw reported that Supreme Court Bar Association (SCBA) president Dushyant Dave said at the general body meeting today, in which he had threatened to vote on a boycott of official functions at the Supreme Court attended by judges, that the bench had apparently listened to his demands, including for better infrastructure.

LiveLaw reported Dave saying:

We will celebrate Independence Day and Law Day functions without inviting any of the dignitaries. Today Mr. Venugopal and Mr. Kapil Sibal met me and asked whether they could mediate. I said we are not going to go to the Judges but if they could intervene it is more than welcome.

They met CJI at 10.20 am and the CJI [HL Dattu] has now constituted a Committee. This GBM is now Postponed for 6 weeks for the Committee to address our grievances. If they are not intervening, we’ll again meet and pass the Resolution. This acknowledgement is the beginning of the restoration of our dignity.

Justices Anil R Dave, JS Kehar, Dipak Misra, RF Nariman and UU Lalit will be heading the committee.

Dave had come under fire from other senior advocates such as Ram Jethmalani and PP Rao for his proposed action.

Update: Several senior Supreme Court advocates have criticised Dave’s proposal of following “Mahatma Gandhi’s principle of Non-Cooperation” for Supreme Court Bar Association (SCBA) members to boycott official functions that include Supreme Court judges.