Bar, Bench & Litigation

A Supreme Court bench headed by Justice Ranjan Gogoi, together with justices PC Pant and UU Lalit, issued a contempt notice on retired Supreme Court judge Markandey Katju in a review petition in the Soumya murder case to which Gogoi had last month surprisingly invited Katju to argue in.

Senior counsel and parliamentarian Ram Jethmalani, who’s been waging a war with the governing party after falling out over the issue of black money, wrote in a blog post that the demonetisation of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes is “some good news in the matter of black money recovery”, although it was primarily a “cover up operation” by the government.

An initiative funded and conceived by Rohini Nilekani, the wife of Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani, and incubated by the Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy, where she is a patron, seeks to explain all Indian laws and legal problems in easy-to-understand English.

Senior counsel and Bar Council of India (BCI) chairman Manan Kumar Mishra has sent a letter to prime minister Narendra Modi, copying in the finance, law and commerce ministers, pleading with Modi to not challenge the BCI’s role in regulating the legal profession and the entry of foreign law firms and to bring the BCI back to the negotiating table about the future of the profession.

Indian national cricket team captain Mahendra Singh Dhoni and his trademark management firm Rhiti Sports Management secured the domain name www.msdhoni.com in a favourable trademark and personality rights infringement order against David Hanley of New York, who was squatting on the domain name.

The Common Law Admission Test (CLAT) is of no interest to the government, submitted the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) in the Supreme Court yesterday, in response to Shamnad Basheer’s challenge to the conduct of CLAT by national law universities (NLUs).

The Common Law Admission Test (CLAT) core committee decided to bar candidates above the age of 20 years from appearing in the CLAT, 2017 onward, following the Bar Council of India’s (BCI) September 2016 circular to law schools reinstating the age bar for the LLB degree in India.

A Supreme Court bench of justices Pinaki Chandra Ghose and Ashok Bhushan, last week, on 20 October, extended the deadline for submission of applications for the verification process of lawyers to 30 November 2016, making it clear that it would sanction no further delays.

The Indian Corporate Counsels Association (ICCA) has proposed eight weekly meetings between various stakeholders in the legal services liberalisation discussion, in order to prepare a status report on the points of consensus and disagreement between them.

The Cauvery dispute is the most intractable of all the river water disputes, did you say? Think again.

It was a series of surprises wrapped in an enigma, so to speak. In the end, the King of Surprises, Justice Ranjan Gogoi, pretty much proved to those who assembled in Court 5 of the Supreme Court on 17 October that no one could beat him in the game of springing surprises.

The Bar Council of India (BCI) has proposed to tighten its control over the legal profession by assuming more than a dozen new functions, statutorily recognising bar associations, formulating new governing rules for law firms and foreign lawyers, and enacting more stringent standards of professional qualification and conduct.

The Cauvery climax, which was originally scheduled for 6 October, unraveled itself yesterday.

The National Green Tribunal’s (NGT) website was hacked yesterday, for the second time since March 2013. The hack was ostensibly in revenge against the Indian army’s recent “surgical strikes” operation, according to a message on the environment regulator’s website.

The Supreme Court today told the Bar Council of India (BCI) that state bar councils should hold elections, even if the BCI’s verification drive had not yet been completed, ordering the BCI to frame guidelines to conduct elections and relax its certificate or practice rules if required to allow elections, reported Bar & Bench.

The Hindu newspaper yesterday successfully persuaded the SC to change its mind for the second time in the same case.