Bar Council of India (BCI) chairman Manan Kumar Mishra in an insightful interview with legal website Bar & Bench reiterated his strong opposition to the entry of foreign law firms, noted that the BCI had been cancelling licenses for around 10 law schools per meeting, expressed a grouse against law teachers and promised to bring law firm misconduct under the BCI’s scanner with the Society of Indian Law Firms (SILF).

The magistrate who had ordered two women, who criticised Mumbai’s shut-down on Facebook after the death of Bal Thackeray last week , to be taken into judicial custody and later released on Rs 30,000 bail, has been transferred to Jalgaon in the far North of Maharashtra. The Bombay High Court has orde...

BCI domain: Offline The Bar Council of India’s (BCI) homepage domain name registration lapsed yesterday (26 November) making the legal regulator’s site temporarily inaccessible. However, the regulator’s website should now be online again throughout the day as this morning’s re-registration of the do...

A heated exchange between Supreme Court Bar Association (SCBA) president PH Parekh and suspended secretary KC Kaushik at the SC’s Law Day celebrations yesterday caused dignitaries including law minister Ashwini Kumar and chief justice of India Altamas Kabir to temporarily leave the venue. Kaushik an...

The new law minister Ashwani Kumar has asked the new Chief Justice of India (CJI) Altamas Kabir to look again at ex-CJI SH Kapadia’s nomination of sitting Supreme Court judge Swatanter Kumar for chairperson of the National Green Tribunal (NGT). Kabir faces the choice of either confirming Kapadia’s d...

The Delhi High Court Bar Association (DHCBA) yesterday resisted the proposal of the Delhi high court to increase its original jurisdiction from Rs 20 lakh to Rs 2 crore, noting that it would inconvenience the litigant public, “affect the quality of the judgements” and decrease the opportunity for young lawyers to get “groomed” on the original side.

Exclusive: Supreme Court Bar Association (SCBA) secretary KC Kaushik, who was censured by the body for allegedly advertising his son’s practice in the SCBA member directories, has accused additional solicitor general and SCBA vice president Rakesh Khanna and SCBA president PH Parekh of using their SCBA executive offices for personal gains.

The Delhi district court’s pecuniary jurisdiction may increase from Rs 20 lakh to Rs 2 crore after the proposal was considered in a meeting of judges of the Delhi high court yesterday, according to two independent sources. Today rumours have been spreading in Delhi courts’ corridors via text message...

The Delhi high court has launched an online payment system for litigants and lawyers to pay court fees.

The system will allow court fee stamps to be bought online.

The high court’s computer committee will now examine also rolling it out to Delhi’s district courts. [The Hindu]

Delhi’s more than 24 tribunals, with 5 more in the pipeline, are demanding official bungalows for their heads “in keeping with their [retired judge] rank”. However, while 32 bungalows for Supreme Court judges and 45 for high court judges are reserved in Lutyens’ Delhi, no such quota exists for tribu...

The Karnataka state government has sent a formal request to the Chief Justice of India (CJI) to set up a permanent bench of the Supreme Court in Bangalore. The Times of India and Business Standard reported that the minister for law and parliamentary affairs, Suresh Kumar, said on Saturday that the s...

The collegium system of judges’ appointments has come under judicial scrutiny again, through a petition for review of the Supreme Court’s nine-judge bench verdict in 1993 in Advocates on Record Association V Union of India . The petition filed by a Rajasthan-based trust prays for an 11-judge bench t...

Exclusive: The Indian Express and Pioneer newspapers will carry front-page apologies for misreporting court proceedings, after yesterday’s hearing in the Supreme Court’s (SC) suo motu contempt petition against the two papers.

Law minister Ashwini Kumar was presented with five complaints against sitting Supreme Court judges on the first day he assumed office last week. Refusing to name the judges, the former senior advocate said all complaints were “in bad taste”. His predecessor in the law ministry, Salman Khursheed, had...

The High Court of Jammu & Kashmir (J&K) will get six new judges, reducing its shortfall of seven judges to one according to Greater Kashmir’s information from “highly placed sources”. The Supreme Court’s collegium has cleared the names of two senior district judges and four lawyers which w...

”) The Delhi High Court Bar Association (DHCBA) published a notice on Saturday that appears to have incorrectly explained the service tax (ST) rules on restaurant bills, urging its members, families, friends and clients to refuse to pay the correct amounts.

Judicial vacancies have decreased since last year across 21 high courts in India but nevertheless 30 per cent of 895 judges’ posts sanctioned remain vacant, according to statistics released on Monday.

Can a high court review its own decision after the Supreme Court has dismissed a special leave petition from such decision? The absence of a definite answer to this question is causing the double-filing of special leave petitions before the SC. A bench of SC justices Dipak Misra and KS Radhakrishnan...

Allahabad high court justice Yatindra Singh yesterday took oath as chief justice of Chhatisgarh high court after 13 years at the bench in Allahabad. Singh enrolled at the bar in 1973. [BS/Chhatisgarh high court]

India Today dockets the lives and times of India’s top eight senior advocates. All of them keep expensive hobbies and none of them bill below Rs 5 lakh – per appearance. The oldest active lawyer in India, Ram Jethmalani : Aged 90, and enrolled at the bar as the youngest member at age 18, he maintain...