bar exam
State bar councils are planning to hold regional bar exams for each state, as the holding of the all India bar exam has turned into a political circus between the Bar Council of India (BCI), its chairman and the state bar councils. Meanwhile, the BCI will meet in Chennai this weekend (20 November), probably without BCI chairman Gopal Subramanium.
The Aurangabad student respondents' counsel in the bar exam Supreme Court transfer petition decided against a second mentioning of an interim stay application after having been declined once before by the Chief’s court, as the Chamber judge is likely to take up the matter for non-prosecution after three months in line with standard procedural practices in the apex court.
The Punjab and Haryana High Court has again deferred the bar exam writ petition hearing today to 1 December citing inability to take up the matter in view of the ongoing Supreme Court proceedings and transfer petition.
Exclusive: The Supreme Court may have set the stage for the next round of proceedings in the All India Bar Exam challenges after completing the summoning process but certainty has continued to elude thousands of law graduates, as only two out of six anti-exam petitioners are still in active pursuit of the case while the other four have become absentee litigants for most intents and purposes.
Hastened by the impending Diwali court holidays and the 31 October deadline to apply for the bar exam, the petitions against the exam in the Supreme Court momentarily picked up speed this week.
An application for stay of the Bar Exam was unsuccessful in the Supreme Court today as the registrar referred the Bar Council of India’s (BCI) failure to serve notices on respondents to a chamber judge, although no substantive hearing will now be possible before the Diwali court vacations end on 8 November.
Today’s hearing in the All India Bar Examination (AIBE) matter has been postponed by one more day following an inadvertent administrative delay in sending the case files from the Supreme Court Registry to the registrar’s court.
The Supreme Court writ petitions in the bar exam has been postponed again, this time to 25 October, following no notices having been served on respondents.
A day before the Supreme Court hearing in the All India Bar Exam (AIBE), over 80,000 lawyers from 240 bar associations of the Madhya Pradesh State Bar Council have gone on a one-day token strike today to protest the exam, which they say is “unconstitutional” and causes unnecessary hardship on students.
The Punjab and Haryana High Court has reaffirmed and upheld the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction in the adjudication of the impending writ petitions against the All India Bar Examination (AIBE) citing the apex court’s earlier decision to combine and hear the matter as transfer petition titled Bar Council of India vs Babubhai Vaghela & Ors.
[Legally Drawn is back after a long US bar exam-related exile. I believe he is not referring to the Indian bar exam, by the way, but the US bar exam.
Legally Drawn is created by Vasanth Sarathy and is published on his blog www.legallydrawn.com
We will be featuring his future cartoons on Legally India.]
Responding to a Right to Information (RTI) Act request by a Nalsar graduate, the Bar Council of India (BCI) did not disclose the fees that would be paid to legal industry service provider Rainmaker in connection with conducting the all India bar exam while admitting that it did not actively look for any other suitable providers.
This controversy-packed week all of India lived in fear of Friday, awaiting the verdict in the 60-year-old Ayodhya land title dispute.
Procedural delays were set to derail the discussions on the merits in the All India bar examination court challenges, as the Supreme Court has adjourned the hearing in the transfer petition to 20 October after ordering the issue of fresh notices to the respondents and the shifting of the case to the Delhi High Court was not mentioned.