Fri. Mar 29th, 2024
Supreme-Court-of-India

Less than a month after four senior-most judges of the Supreme Court held an unprecedented press conference to publicly revolt against “arbitrary” allocation of cases, Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra yesterday put up details of a new roster on the court’s website.

Supreme Court’s Chief Justice is called ‘master of the roster’ as he possesses administrative powers to allocate cases to benches of the apex court. It was just last month that Justices Chelameswar, Ranjan Gogoi, Madan B Lokur and Kurien Joseph had raised questions on the way certain politically-sensitive cases were being allotted to specific judges only.

Chief Justice Misra has now come up with a new roster that will come into effect from 5 February and will allocate matters directly to judges based on subject matter of cases. He has retained with himself all special leave petitions and PILs relating to social justice, elections, arbitration and criminal matters.

All other matters have been assigned to benches headed by twelve judges on the basis of their seniority, namely Justices Chelameswar, Gogoi, Lokur, Joseph, AK Sikri, SA Bobde, RK Agarwal, NV Ramana, Arun Mishra, AK Goel and RF Nariman.

The four senior-most judges had previously written a letter to the Chief Justice citing irregularities in allocation of cases involving the central government to selective benches. During their press briefing, they had specifically indicated reference to the matter concerning Justice Loya’s death being allotted to Justice Arun Mishra.

Their press briefing against the Chief Justice’s arbitrary allocation of cases had sparked off a storm on the political circles as well. Some opposition parties like CPI were even considering moving an impeachment motion against the Chief Justice during the ongoing Budget session of Parliament.

By dhruv