The Supreme Court has elevated 38 lawyers to senior counsel status, a list that unusually also includes some bright up-and-comers and also several graduates of NLSIU Bangalore, which has become a semi-regular fixture in the senior counsel stakes.*

Full PDF list of all designations, here.

We spoke to Nakul Dewan, one of the 38, who commented: “The Supreme Court has considered a lot of young practitioners, which is very welcome.”

Gopal Sankaranarayanan, a 2001 NLSIU graduate who is 41 years old (young), said: “I think it’s extremely encouraging that a large number of people have been designated.”

Alluding to the long-running controversy over the arguably archaic senior counsel system, he added: “I do hope in the years to come we’ll slowly move towards a system, where that kind of distinction that exists between senior and non-senior will slowly fade away.”

We understand that the youngest lawyers to ever have been designated as senior counsel would probably be Rohinton Nariman (now Justice) and Gopal Subramanium, who were elevated when they were around 37 (corrections or clarifications from readers are welcome here, of course).

Some names from the full list (in alphabetical order):

• Gaurav Bhatia (Lucknow University LLB 2004, 41 years old, former co-founder of SRGR Law Offices, secretary of SCBA 2015-2017, Additional Advocate General Uttar Pradesh 2012-16)
• Siddharth Dave (1997 NLSIU grad)
• Nakul Dewan (qualified in India in 2001, barrister at London chambers 20 Essex Street, practises in Singapore (qualified in 2010), Delhi and London (qualified to the English bar in 2014))
• Madhavi Goradia Divan (Cambridge University law degree; Additional Solicitor General)
• Menaka Guruswamy (1997 NLSIU grad; LLM from Harvard Law School; BCL from the University of Oxford; 2015 D Phil from Oxford)
• Nikhil Nayyar (NLSIU grad)
• Ritin Rai (1992 St Stephens Economics BA; 1995 LLB Delhi University CLC; 1997 Oxford University BCL; 1998 Harvard Law School LLM, worked at Jones Day from 1998 - 2000, and Pathak & Associates from 2000 - 2003)
• Gopal Sankaranarayanan (2001 NLSIU)
• Anitha Shenoy (1995 NLSIU grad)

We will continue updating this list - if there are any bright youngsters or others from NLUs or with unusual CVs that we should mention, please let us know in the comments and we’ll update.

Story being updated.

Full list of names

• Madhavi Goradia Divan
• R. Balasubramanian
• Anitha Shenoy
• Aruneshwar Gupta
• Jugal Kishore Tikamchand Gilda
• Sanjay Parikh
• Preetesh Kapur
• Ashok Kumar Sharma
• Deepak Madhusudan Nargolkar
• Ajit Shankarrao Bhasme
• Nikhil Nayyar
• S Wasim A Qadri
• MG Ramachandran
• Manish Singhvi
• Gopal Sankaranarayanan
• Mohan Venkatesh Katarki
• Nakul Dewan
• Devadatt Kamat
• Anip Sachthey
• Anupam Lal Das
• G Venkatesh Rao
• Jayanth Muth Raj
• Arijit Prasad
• Jay Savla
• Aparajita Singh
• Menaka Guruswamy
• Siddhartha Dave
• Siddharth Bhatnagar
• CN Sreekumar
• Aishwarya Bhati
• Santosh Paul
• Gaurav Bhatia
• Bharat Sangal
• Vinay Prabhakar Navare
• Manoj Swarup
• Ritin Rai
• Priya Hingorani

2019 Supreme Court designations (PDF)

Photo by Pinakpani