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Jitender @ Kalla v. State (Govt.) of NCT of Delhi and Another

Criminal Appeal · 2025 INSC 667Decided 13 May 2025
Crl.A. No.-000865-000865 - 2025 (heard together with Writ Petition (Civil) No. 454 of 2015 and connected interlocutory applications)
Justice Abhay S. Oka · Justice Ujjal Bhuyan · Justice S.V.N. Bhatti

Background

In an earlier ruling in this very criminal appeal (Jitender @ Kalla, dated 20 February 2025), a two-judge Bench had raised concerns about how Senior Advocates are designated by courts, a process earlier governed by the Supreme Court's own 2017 decision in Indira Jaising v. Supreme Court of India ("Indira Jaising-1"), which had set up a points-based assessment system (practice duration, judgments, publications, and a personal interview). The Chief Justice of India then constituted this three-judge Bench specifically to reconsider that designation process, effectively converting the case into a broader review of Indira Jaising-1 and a follow-up ruling ("Indira Jaising-2"), alongside a related writ petition filed years earlier by Senior Advocate Indira Jaising seeking reform of the designation system.

Decision Breakdown

The Court held that the 100-point objective scoring system (with separate marks for years of practice, reported judgments, publications, and interview performance) created by Indira Jaising-1 was unworkable in practice and should be scrapped. It ruled that the decision to confer Senior Advocate status should rest with the Full Court (or Full House of a High Court) based on its collective assessment, not a rigid scoring formula, with voting by secret ballot only where the Full Court cannot reach a consensus. It directed all High Courts to frame fresh Rules within four months in line with specified guidelines, including that individual judges cannot informally recommend candidates, at least one designation exercise must be held every calendar year, and the existing 10-year minimum practice requirement stays unchanged, while designations already made under the old system remain valid.

Lesson Learnt

Rules meant to make an important professional recognition process more "objective" can end up being unworkable if they are too mechanical; the Court's answer here was to give the collective judgment of the Full Court a central role again, rather than trying to reduce advocate ability to a numeric score.

Official source (sci.gov.in)View Judgment (PDF)

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