The First Year At Glance For NCLAT Post-Merger With COMPAT

Close on the heels of 1st February 2017 whereby the Hon'ble Finance Minister of India, Mr. Arun Jaitley presented the Union Budget 2017 in Parliament, the day can be marked as historical for the long lasted empirical legislative history of India. Mr. Jaitley robustly highlighted the key significant work executed by his administration in the last two and a half years headed by NDA Government. The key highlights included the decrease in the inflation rate, the war against black money through...

Environmental Law In An Aggressive Neo-Liberal Era: An Account Of Environment Law Reform Initiatives In India

The choice of philosophy underlying an ideal environmental law is perplexing. The story of human civilization is also about human being’s confrontation with nature and his /her exploitation of nature and its resources. So an environmental law could be anthropocentric. At the same this nature belongs to all living beings in their natural environment and hence an environmental law should promote the peaceful co-existence of all living beings on planet earth. This is called the eco-centric...

The Ignoble Ways Of Legal Profession

To salvage the lost nobility of legal profession, it is necessary to send a strong message by throwing out the goons in gowns from the profession.Lawyers often resort to the self-congratulatory pat that they are in the ‘noble-profession’. I distinctly remember my enrolment ceremony about seven years ago, when one of the then members of the Bar Council congratulated the young lawyers assembled there for choosing the ‘noble profession’. Justice J. Chelameswar, the then Chief Justice of the High...

‘Committed To People Not To Government’

In the Harvard Club of India hosted conversation between Mr. Karan Thapar and Justice Chelameswar on 7th April 2018, Journalist Thapar had posed a question to Justice Chelameswar, regarding the propriety of the 12/1 Press Meet. The question drew its relevance from the 9th principle of the “Restatement of Values of Judicial Life” 1997 that was adopted by the Supreme Court in its Full Court as a charter to be followed by judges, which stated “A Judge is expected to let his judgments speak for...

Constitutional Embarrassment: When SC Stays Ordinance Signed By Ex-CJI On Ground That It Nullifies Court Orders

“When boundaries between judiciary and executive get permeable facilitating easy switch from one role to another, such constitutional embarrassments are bound to happen”.   It is quite unusual for a law to be made to get over a particular judgment by a court. It is further unusual if the law is not one passed by the legislature, but is made by the government through the ‘ordinance route’.It gets more strange when the Ordinance, which is specifically intended to nullify Supreme Court and high...

SC Decision in BCCI vs. Kochi Cricket: Much Ado About Nothing?

After many rounds of deliberations and at least two Law Commission Reports separated by more than a decade (Report 176 in 2001 and Report 246 in 2014), the Arbitration and Conciliation Act, 1996 was finally amended on 23 October 2015 by way of an ordinance. The ordinance route was justified on grounds that the amendments were urgent to send the right message about Indian government’s intentions of making the necessary legal reforms for ease of doing business in India.Despite good intentions, an...

The Reading Down of SC/ST Act: A case of Judicial Insensitivity to Social Justice, Unwanted Judicial Legislation & A Clear Message To Whom It Matters

The insensitivity of the Court towards social justice cause and judicial dilution of a stringent protective social justice legislation by resorting to judicial excess in total disregard of legislative intent was seen reflected once again in Subhash Kashinath Mahajan v. the State of Maharashtra and Anr [hereinafter, Subhash Kashinath]. In this case, a Division Bench Supreme Court comprising of A.K. Goel, J. and U.U. Lalit,J. had...

The Selective Battles Of The Bar Council Of India

The disciplinary actions initiated by BCI of late have given the impression that it is selective and partisan in the battles it wants to wage.The Bar Council of India, which ceased to be truly representative long ago because of the failure to hold due elections in time, recently surprised many with a resolution. The resolution, stated to have been taken on March 18, but announced to the world on March 31 in a press conference held by the Chairman of the ad-hoc Council Senior Advocate Manan Kumar...

Set Off Under Section 428 Cr.P.C

Section 428 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973 (the “Cr.P.C” for short) enabling an accused person to set off against the sentence of imprisonment, the period of detention undergone by him at the pre-conviction stage, is a new provision. There was no corresponding provision in the old Code i.e. the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1898. Section 428 Cr.P.C reads as follows:-“428. Period of detention undergone by the accused to be set off against the sentence of imprisonment – Where an accused...

A Compromised Judicial Independence Is The Single Biggest Security Threat To This Country-Prof. Mohan Gopal

Speech delivered by Prof. Mohan Gopal at the Public Meeting on ‘Independence of the Judiciary - Implications for Democracy’ hosted by Lawyers’ Forum for Democracy and Justice and Lawyers’ Collective at the Indian Society of International Law, Delhi on 23rd March 2018I was just reading the other day by coincidence in 2018 Vanderbilt Law Review an interesting article based on extensive research of the evolution of judicial independence and various safeguards for judicial independence in the United...

The Insolvency And Bankruptcy Code: Some Fundamentals And Issues

The Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code, 2016 ("Code") was conceived as a path-breaking legislation to consolidate and amend the laws relating to reorganisation and insolvency resolution of corporate persons, partnership firms and individuals, in a time bound manner. The avowed objective was also to secure maximization of the value of assets of such persons, to promote entrepreneurship and balance the interest of all the stakeholders. The Legislative intent was to improve ease of doing business and...

Conflict And Conundrum: Section 26 Of The Arbitration And Conciliation (Amendment) Act, 2015

Section 26 of Arbitration and Conciliation (Amendment) Act, 2015 was enshrined to give hiatus to the controversy of applicable provisions to the pending arbitral proceedings. Since then, the provision has been a cause of much speculation and myriad interpretations by various high courts across the country.Section 26 provides as follows:“26. Nothing contained in this Act shall apply to the arbitral proceedings commenced, in accordance with the provisions of section 21 of the principal Act, before...