70 out of the 100 Supreme Court judges, who retired as on 12 February 2016, took up post-retirement jobs with various permanent and ad hoc bodies and committees, with the greatest number taking up quasi-judicial posts, according to data collected by the Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy.

The Bar Council of India (BCI) talks to come up with a new proposal to reform its regulation of the legal profession, have been shrouded in secrecy due to a media gag order since October.

The Supreme Court Bar Association (SCBA) elections may be postponed to January, out of fairness to the SC advocates whose names were removed without proper notice from the SCBA voter list, if the election committee agrees to the request of presidential candidate Adish Aggarwala.

A bench of justices Dipak Misra and Amitava Roy ordered that in line with states such as Maharashtra, all cinema halls in India must play the national anthem before movie screenings in order to “instill a sense of committed patriotism and nationalism” in citizens.

The official website of the Bar Council of India (BCI) at www.barcouncilofindia.org has gone offline, after its domain name apparently expired on Saturday 26 November.

The Bar Council of India (BCI) took almost four months before passing 15 Indians holding foreign law degrees, who took the BCI’s qualifying exam that is a prerequisite to transfer their qualification to India, after having charged the candidates at least $32,000 (around Rs 22 lakhs) to sit the exam.

“On Wednesday, a Supreme Court bench of Justices Ranjan Gogoi and N V Ramana ruled that no one could have copyright over judgments delivered by the apex court. It could be reproduced in its raw form by anyone without the risk of being accused of infringing copyright, the bench said, settling a long-standing dispute,” reported the Times of India.

Delhi High Court Bar Association (DHCBA) president Kirti Uppal, who defeated incumbent president Rajiv Khosla in this year’s DHCBA polls by almost 300 votes, said his vote bank was comprised mostly of first generation lawyers with a practicing experience of five to seven years.

The Indian Express reported that Justice Akil Kureshi had recused himself, following the recusals of Justices M R Shah, Anant Dave, R H Shukla, Sonia Gokani, G B Shah and K S Jhaveri in the appeals of 2002-Naroda Patiya massacre convicts, including ex-BJP minister Maya Kodnani. Kureshi had recused himself after advocate BB Naik, who is related to the judge, had joined the case, though Naik said that he had filed his vakalatnama a long time ago:

Kirti Uppal has defeated incumbent Delhi High Court Bar Association (DHCBA) president Rajiv Khosla by nearly 300 votes in yesterday’s elections.

Arepalli Naga Babu - a former Increasing Diversity by Increasing Access (IDIA) scholar and 2016-graduate of NLU Odisha - has won the right to take a judicial services exam with additional time to compensate for his disability, after initially having been denied to even sit for the exam in the first place.

According to a Right to Information (RTI) response received and reported by Bar & Bench, between 1990 and 2016, the Karnataka Water Resources Department has spent at least Rs 37.5 crore on around 20 lawyers representing it in disputes such as the Cauvery battle, of which 91% (or Rs 34.22 crore) were billed by five senior lawyers alone.

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.

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 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.