Three high court chief justices - MY Eqbal from Madras, Vikramajit Sen from Karnataka and V Gopalagowda from the Orissa high court - will be elevated to the apex court soon, according to The Hindu . Citing law ministry sources, the paper reported that the recommendations made on Wednesday’s would be...

Breaking: Senior advocates Ram Jethmalani and PK Jain today withdrew their candidature for Supreme Court Bar Association (SCBA) president just before today’s 4:30pm deadline by which nominations for the 2013 elections could be withdrawn. Their withdrawals from the race follow senior advocate Adish Aggarwala yesterday, reducing the race for the SCBA president’s office to one between only three candidates after the incumbent PH Parekh did not run again for the post.

Exclusive: Senior advocate Adish Aggarwala, who was contesting for the office of the Supreme Court Bar Assocation’s (SCBA) president in the SCBA elections next Thursday, withdrew his candidature yesterday. He cited the removal of his name from the SCBA’s voter list, blaming SCBA president PH Parekh.

Exclusive: The Supreme Court Bar Association (SCBA) elections for 2013 will be held on 13 December, months behind the conventional schedule of polling in May and with the compact voter list of 1372 bar members, after the Supreme Court (SC) ruled that those voting in other bar association elections cannot vote in the SCBA elections.

21-year old law aspirant Shreya Singhal, a graduate in astrophysics from the UK’s Bristol University, daughter of Supreme Court advocate Manali Singhal and grand daughter of the late Delhi high court judge Justice Sunanda Bhandare, challenged section 66A of the Information Technology Act in the Supreme Court today under which two women were booked for a comment critical of Bal Thackeray on Facebook 10 days ago.

Former Supreme Court chief justice AH Ahmadi’s son advocate Huzefa Ahmadi, and former additional advocate general of Tamil Nadu Guru Krishnakumar were designated senior advocates by the Supreme Court of India with effect from 21 November. Following convention, 15 judges from various high courts were...

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...