Supreme Court

The recommendation supersedes two High Court chief justices, one of whom could have been the first Sikh judge in the Supreme Court since 2017, and puts into motion the only second time that a woman practising lawyer may be directly elevated to the top Court.

In its 124-page judgement upholding the Election Commission’s Special Intensive Revision of Bihar’s electoral rolls, the Supreme Court ruled that the Election Commission acted within its constitutional authority under Article 324 and the Representation of People Act.

A recent approval by the top Court for medical termination of a 15-year old girl’s pregnancy is the latest addition to a case-by-case jurisprudence pushing for greater reproductive autonomy. But without access to courts, abortion remains a mounting challenge for women tangled in the MTP Act’s legal bottlenecks.

While Senior Advocate Khambata cautioned the Bench against conflating religious autonomy with denominational dominance and urged it to read constitutional silences not as vacuums, Senior Advocate Ramachandran brought before the Court the lived consequences of excommunication within the Dawoodi Bohra community.

While the Indian Young Lawyers' Association struggled to justify its standing before the Court, Senior Advocate Darius Khambata, appearing for a Parsi Zoroastrian woman denied entry into the agiary after marrying a Hindu man, argued that no religion can strip a believing woman of her faith simply because she married outside her community.

With hate speech events averaging four a day and a nine-year-old Law Commission recommendation still unheeded, the Supreme Court's refusal to act meaningfully leaves the Constitution’s promise of equal protection suspended between two branches of government.

The stated intent behind the passage of the Bill to amend the Supreme Court (Number of Judges) Act, 1956 is ‘speedy justice’. With two existing vacancies and four new ones opening up, could we see an emphasis in appointment of women judges?

Through suo motu intervention, a bench led by Chief Justice Surya Kant noted that bail conditions like sweeping police stations reflected ‘caste-based bias’ and ‘colonial mindset’ in the Odisha judiciary, directing its order to be circulated across the country.