Bar, Bench & Litigation

Bar Council of India (BCI) chairman Manan Kumar Mishra has sent an email today to Legally India editor Kian Ganz, which he has requested we publish in full.

The Bar Council of India’s (BCI) proposed delegation of 12 BCI members and “accompanying members” to Washington DC that would have cost more than Rs 48 lakh according to our report on 6 September, is now apparently cancelled.

Even amongst epic legal dramas, the Cauvery river water dispute between Tamil Nadu and Karnataka has taken more twists and turns than most, with the Supreme Court’s latest orders asking Karnataka to release water to Tamil Nadu, provoking violent protests in Karnataka and the imposition of a curfew turning Bangalore it into a ghost town.

At least 11 state bar councils and their representatives to the Bar Council of India (BCI) are now continuing in their posts despite their terms having ended, in some cases for nearly two years, including in Delhi, Maharashtra, Bihar, Rajasthan, Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka bar councils.

The Bar Association of India (BAOI) has elected Society of Indian Law Firms (Silf) president Dr Lalit Bhasin as its new president, according to a press release from the bar body.

After a one-year hiatus and due to rather major popular demand, we are intending resurrect the Mooting Premier League (MPL) this year. However, we need your help: we are looking for between one and two very special students who are mad about mooting with an interest in journalism who can report on the MPL for tens of thousands of India’s mooting and non-mooting law students.

GNLU Gandhinagar has cleared the exam applications of two detained students yesterday, minutes after Legally India reported that the students were in detention limbo due to administrative inaction for weeks.

The Supreme Court on Wednesday directed that all first information reports (FIRs) involving cognizable offences must be uploaded on state police web sites within 24 hours of their registration.

The Indian Express and others have reported this litigation over the trendy augmented reality mobile game, which requires users to collect virtual pets in the real world:

On 31 August, a two-judge Supreme Court bench comprising justices Gopal Gowda andArun Mishra delivered two separate judgments on the Singur land dispute, with split reasoning, but reached similar results.

The Bar Council of India (BCI) resolved to fly 12 of its members, by business class, to Washington DC this month to attend the International Bar Association’s (IBA) annual conference, which the BCI had missed for the last five years “due to inadvertent on the part of the [BCI] office”.

Justice Jasti Chelameswar, the fifth-most senior judge of the Supreme Court, and a member of the SC’s collegium, made the news today with the New Indian Express publishing his refusal to participate in a Supreme Court collegium meeting, as a protest against the collegium’s failure to comply with the principle of transparency of its proceedings.

Lawyer Janhavi Gadkar, who in 2015 while working at Reliance Industries as an in-house lawyer killed two while allegedly driving drunk in Mumbai, will likely appear in court on 20 September when charges against her will be framed, reported the Times of India:

In another pragmatic order dealing with the until-recently fairly haphazard regime of John Doe blocking of pirated movies on websites, Justice Gautam Patel of the Bombay high court has cited an article by Legally India published in Mint as “quite excellent”, “extremely well researched, thoughtful and incisive” (see excerpt above).

In a clear message to senior lawyers that they could not take liberty with the court by making a last minute request for pass-over or adjournment of a matter listed for hearing, a Supreme Court bench on Tuesday withdrew from hearing the matters for an hour after in four of the first five matters, as junior lawyers sought pass-overs repeatedly.