Supreme Court judge Sarosh Homi Kapadia will take over as Chief Justice of India (CJI) from outgoing CJI K G Balakrishnan on 12 May 2010, while the Supreme Court will have its first female judge in almost four years, the government of India announced today.
The government formally announced the appointment of Kapadia (pictured) as CJI and the swearing in of three new Supreme Court Justices, including Jharkhand High Court Chief Justice Gyan Sudha Mishra who will be the first woman sitting on Supreme Court benches since 2006.
Outgoing CJI Balakrishnan will retire on 11 May after having completed more than three years holding the office of CJI and will be replaced by Kapadia, who will be the country’s thirty-eighth CJI.
He is the most senior Supreme Court judge after Balakrishnan, having been elevated to the Supreme Court of India in 2003, which is almost two years before the next-most senior Supreme Court judge Altamas Kabir.
The CJI is India’s most senior constitutional judicial position, to which the President of India by convention appoints the judge with the most number of years on the Supreme Court bench.
Kapadia had started his legal career on 10 September 1974 when he was enrolled as an advocate and joined the judiciary as an Additional Judge of the Bombay High Court in 1991 after over 25 years of practice in various Indian courts. In 2003 he was appointed Chief Justice of the Uttaranchal High Court and in December of the same year rose to the Supreme Court of India.
Kapadia is scheduled to retire from the Supreme Court at the mandatory retirement age of 65 on 29 September 2012.
Meanwhile, outgoing CJI Balakrishnan will also swear in three new Supreme Court judges: Madras High Court Chief Justice Hemant Laxman Gokhale, Jharkhand High Court Chief Justice Misra and Bombay High Court Chief Justice Anil Ramesh Dave.
Misra is the first woman to be a Supreme Court judge since the retirement of Justice Ruma Pal in June 2006.
Once Balakrishnan retires, the Supreme Court will consist of a total of 29 sitting judges, out of a maximum of 31. [Clarification: original story mentioned a figure that did not count the newly appointed judges -Ed]
Comments
If anyone can shed some more light and knowledge on this process would be interesting.
Best,
Kian
But in any case, the verdict is almost definitely expected before Balakrishnan resigns.
On another note, makes you wonder - maybe having all judges resign every three months could drastically reduce pendency of cases?
Just a thought.
Best,
Kian
Balakrishnan is retiring and not resigning. :-)
[Thanks for pointing out - now corrected. -Kian]
Also, Justice Nadira Patherya is languishing in the Calcutta High Court for many years. She is knowledgeable and is fluent in English (the latter quality can no longer be taken for granted among Indian lawyers today). If Justice Patherya is promoted, our stupid media should highlight her as a role model for Muslim women, instead of that overhyped bimbo drama queen sania mirza.
@#7: You might be glad to hear that Justice Misra is pretty fluent in English too :P
As a matter of fact, J. Kapadia was in SC before Balakrishnan, and still Balakrishnan was made CJI. Why? He's older. So, now we know.
Please check again, there are 29 Judges in the SC court at the minute, and the sanctioned strength is 30
2. Justice. Kapadia
3. Justice. Kabir
4. Justice. Raveendran
5. Justice. Bhandari
6. Justice. D.k.Jain
7. Justice. Katju
8. Justice. H.S. Bedi
9. Justice. Sirpurkar
10. Justice. B. S. Reddy
11. Justice. Sathasivam
12. Justice. Singhvi
13. Justice. Aftab Alam
14. Justice. J.M. Panchal
15. Justice. M.K. Sharma
16. Justice. Cyriac Joseph
17. Justice. A K Ganguly
18. Justice. R M Lodha
19. Justice. H.L. Dattu
20. Justice. Deepak Verma
21. Justice. B S Chauhan
22. Justice. A K Patniak
23. Justice. T.S. Thakur
24. Justice. K.S Radhakrishnan
25. Justice. S S Nijjar
26. Justice. Mishra
27. Justice. Dave
28. Justice. Gokhale
Get you facts right first… then reach a conclusion (are you really a lawyer / law student or a gossip monger!)
Justice K.G. Balakrishnan was elevated as the Judge, Supreme Court on 08-06-2000.
Justice S.H. Kapadia was elevated to the Bench of the Supreme Court on 18-12-2003.
Source: http://supremecourtofindia.nic.in/
I hope now you know… its seniority at the SC bench and not age.
of course, the biggest problem is that if we have such an exam laloo yadav and co will start demanding reservations.
Title is actually misleading. The heading should be abbreviated in such a way that a person not reading the complete story does not have a wrong view.
Proof read please!
[I think this is mincing meanings somewhat. I thought the appointment of a first woman in four years was more interesting than Kapadia as CJI, which was on the cards anyway. Therefore we focused on that for the headline. The semicolon may be easy to miss but it is there and would be hard to construe SH Kapadia is the first woman SC judge and CJI unless in a real hurry. -Ed]
SH KAPADIA APPOINTED NEW CJI; JHARKHAND CJ TO BE FIRST WOMAN SC JUDGE SINCE 2006
But then that's quite a mouthful and would take up too much space!
Also, giving importance to more 'interesting' than 'important' only makes another india tv. kindly desist for good.
While I am not sure how the current heading confuses J. Kapadia's gender, it certainly gives the impression to any reasonable reader glancing through the headlines that Indian Supreme Court is getting a female judge for the first time in its history. Well, that is not the case. Many readers may not want to know the name or other particulars of the first woman judge in Indian SC. So they move on to the next item with the impression that the Indian SC has got its first ever woman judge.
And Kian, you may think the title is perfectly fine. You may be right in thinking so too. But the fact that among all these comments you are the only one who thinks so, indicates that the average reader of your site finds the title misleading. As headlines are meant to communicate with the reader and not with the author, don't you think we have a point here?
I really think it's a bit of a moot point really but we have reverted the headline back to the original by adding "again" after "First woman SC judge" to clarify matters, although I do think confusion if any really was minimal.
Anyway, happy to clarify if such a big issue although the headline does not roll off the tongue anymore.
Best,
Kian
What mother's milk is to baby, mother tongue is to education.