Indira Gandhi's Emergency Was Face-to-Face, Dictatorship Today Wears a Mask // How Justice Arun Mishra Became the Most Influential Judge in the Supreme Court
During a recent phone
conversation with senior counsel Ravi Varma Kumar, I asked him, “How is the
Supreme Court doing?” We were talking in the
background of the judgment
by the three-judge Supreme Court bench which found that Prashant
Bhushan’s tweets were in contempt of the court. Ravi said, “The
judiciary itself makes an allegation; it initiates proceedings itself and then
proves the case, and then passes a judgment saying the allegations have been
proven that is what has happened in our Supreme Court.” The three-judge bench
did not even seriously take account of the reply submitted by Bhushan before
passing its orders.
I felt like visiting the Supreme Court to ascertain whether
the statue of the goddess of justice, who has a blindfold on and carries
balancing scales so that she may be fair, still exists. Because the judgment by
this court was blind. The Supreme Court
lawyer, Gautam Bhatia, captures
this judgment well with a metaphor, “It reminds me of the times I used
to take a football from the halfway line, dribble it across the pitch, and kick
it into the goal – without any opposition players on the field.”...
https://thewire.in/law/prashant-bhushan-tweets-supreme-court-india-democracyHow Justice Arun Mishra Rose to Become the Most Influential Judge in the Supreme Court
Justice Arun Mishra,
who retires from the Supreme Court of India on September 2, is arguably the
most influential puisne judge the apex court has seen in recent years. Before we delve into
the legacy of his judgments, a little bit of family background may be
helpful. Son of Hargovind G. Mishra, a former judge of the Madhya Pradesh
high court who served from December 1977 to July 1982, when he died in office,
Justice Arun Mishra belongs to a family of lawyers.
He was recommended by
the Supreme Court’s collegium for elevation to the apex court during the tenure
of the then chief justice of India, R.M. Lodha, after the Narendra Modi
government assumed office at the Centre in 2014. At the time, Justice
Arun Mishra was chief justice of the Calcutta high court. Earlier, he had
served as chief justice of the Rajasthan high court for two years, from
November 2010 to December 2012. He first became a judge of the Madhya
Pradesh high court on October 25, 1999 and remained there till his shift to
Rajasthan in 2010. Between 1978 and 1999, he was a lawyer and his practice
included constitutional, civil, industrial, service and criminal matters.
In 1998, at the age of
43, he became the youngest chairman of the Bar Council of India. In his
official profile on the Supreme Court’s website, Justice Arun Mishra makes a
special mention of his contribution as BCI chairman – the introduction of
five-year law courses, closure of “sub-standard law colleges”, disposal of a
large number of disciplinary cases, framing of rules on foreign lawyers’
conditions and practice in India, and enhancement of medical aid to lawyers….
https://thewire.in/law/justice-arun-mishra-judgments-analysis