The Supreme Court yesterday upheld the Bombay high court’s decision to strike down the ban on dance bars in Maharashtra, holding that “the cure is worse than the disease” and that safety measures and improvement in working conditions of the dancers was the solution, reported the Hindustan Times . No...

Deepak Khosla, a petitioner in the Shimla high court, asked for compensation of Rs 1 crore from two sitting judicial officers, police personnel, public prosecutors and McDonalds managing director Vikram Bakshi. Khosla alleged he had been “framed” in baseless criminal proceedings, resulting in substa...

The higher judiciary is revamping the system of appointment of senior advocates, to weed out incompetent advocates and appointment through ‘uncle judges’. In the Delhi high court, the full court will now have to consider the name of each applicant, while in the Supreme Court five sitting judges of t...

Gujarat high court chief justice (CJ) Bhaskar Bhattacharya, whose elevation to the Supreme Court was rejected unanimously by the SC collegium , has accused chief justice of India (CJI) Altamas Kabir of bias spurred by Bhattacharya’s opposition of the CJI’s sister’s elevation to the bench, reported t...

A Supreme Court bench of Justices AK Patnaik and SJ Mukhopadhaya ruled that lawmakers can be disqualified if they have been convicted of a criminal offence. The bench struck down as ultra vires section 8(4) of the Representation of the People Act (RPA), which protected MPs, MLAs and other legislator...

Lawyers’ lack of professionalism is affecting litigants’ cases and causing them distress, as judges ignore the problem helplessly, argued Harvard Law fellow and Centre for Policy Research visiting faculty Nick Robinson in The Hindu . A prestigious law firm employs an associate to follow a well-known...

Senior-most Supreme Court justice P Sathasivam was appointed Chief Justice of India-designate on Saturday. He will be sworn in as the Chief Justice of India CJI) on 19 July, a day after current CJI Altamas Kabir’s retirement. Sathasivam, aged 64, is the first judge from Tamil Nadu to become the CJI,...

A frustrated walk-out by Kerala high court judge K Vinod Chandran halted court proceedings less than half hour after they had begun on Friday, reported the Hindu . Chandran had granted 11 pass overs on request from government pleaders when the 12th government pleader also asked for a pass over on th...

The DoJ project to computerise 14,249 courts is 85 per cent complete, according to an RTI response.

Read the full judgment of the Madras high court, which was the cause of controversy, outrage and humour on social and other media.

Supreme Court justice GS Misra has responded to a Times of India column, in which senior court reporter Dhananjay Mahapatra had criticised how SC judges at times were late to their own courts during the summer vacations. Misra wrote in her letter, published in today’s Times , that judges’ time is no...

Bombay, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh high and subordinate courts will in real time upload their case pendency statistics and case progress reports online, with litigants slated to have access to some of the data via phone text messages. The deadline for these three states’ courts to implement the up...

According to the Madras high court an unmarried couple of legally marriageable age is considered married once they have pre-marital sex, and the ‘husband’ in such marriage cannot marry someone else without getting a court decree of divorce from the ‘wife’, reports the Hindu . Gems from justice Karna...

The Delhi subordinate judiciary recruited at 18.4 per cent of its actual requirement this year, despite getting the nod of the Delhi government to recruit according to requirement.

The Bar Council of India’s (BCI) chairman Manan Kumar Mishra and vice chairman Zafar A Khan will prepare a report on the manner in which the BCI and the state bar councils could participate in the appointment process of Supreme Court judges and the chief justices of all high courts. The report is pl...

Delhi high court now has an acting chief justice in the HC’s senior-most justice BD Ahmed after chief justice D Murugesan retired on 8 June. An additional judge at the HC justice Mool Chand Garg is now a permanent judge of the court. The Punjab & Haryana HC’s additional judges, justices Paramje...

The Delhi High Court Bar Association (DHCBA) yesterday observed a strike against Delhi HC chief justice D Murugesan’s proposal to enhance the HC’s pecuniary jurisdiction from Rs 1 crore to Rs 2 crore. DHCBA members manned courtroom entry points and urged lawyers not to appear in their cases. Litigan...

Five out of ten Delhi Judicial Service (DJS) exam 2011 toppers collecting their appointment letters at the Delhi high court today are Delhi University (DU) law graduates.

Over 250 Supreme Court Bar Association (SCBA) members signed a petition calling for action against attorney general (AG) Goolam Vahanvati for allegedly interfering with the Central Bureau of Investigation’s (CBI) report on the coal blocks allocation scam, according to a report in the Times of India ...

The Supreme Court yesterday dismissed petitioner ML Sharma’s public interest litigation that had challenged the government’s decision to allow 51 per cent foreign direct investment (FDI) in multi-brand retail. The bench, comprised of justices RM Lodha, Madan B Lokur, and Kurien Joseph, said that whi...