Tuesday, December 08, 2009

sandhya jain on liberhan and related follies

dec 7th, 2009

1 comment:

witan said...

All the news stories I have seen describe Liberhan as a retired "Supreme Court judge". Info gleaned from the Internet -- e.g. http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?210611 dated Dec 25, 2000 -- suggests otherwise. One can extract the following info from the Outlook India article:
§ Liberhan was enrolled as an advocate in the Ambala Court in 1962. After practicing for 25 years in Ambala and Chandigarh, he was elevated as a judge to the Punjab and Haryana High Court in 1987.
§ As a sitting judge in Chandigarh, Liberhan found it difficult to be in Lucknow on a regular basis. It took one year for the Rao government to realise that and the commission was shifted to Delhi.
§ In July 1997, Liberhan was finally promoted as chief justice and posted to the Madras High Court.
§ “...two of his juniors in the Chennai High Court, Justice D. Raju and Justice Shivraj Patil, were elevated to the Supreme Court while Liberhan was denied a place in the bench of the apex court,” says a senior advocate of the Supreme Court.
§ Justice Liberhan retired from the Andhra Pradesh High Court about a month ago
[i.e., in Nov 2000]

So, why is Liberhan being repeatedly referred to as a "retired Supreme Court Judge"? One should also note that he was not "retired", but a sitting judge, when he was appointed to the commission.

Another interesting fact is that the initials of his name, MS, stand for Manmohan Singh.