Chief Justice of India D.Y. Chandrachud and judges of the Supreme Court held a Full Court meeting on Friday to designate 56 lawyers as senior advocates.
Eleven of the advocates-on-record and advocates designated senior advocates by the Supreme Court are women, including Shobha Gupta, who successfully appeared for Bilkis Bano against the remission granted by the Gujarat government to 11 life convicts.
Section 16 of the Advocates Act refers to the separate class of ‘senior advocate’. Both the Supreme Court and High Courts can confer senior designation to lawyers based on their merit, experience, special knowledge of the law and standing at the Bar.
Section 23 of the Act says, “senior advocates shall have pre-audience over other lawyers and their right of pre-audience inter se shall be determined by their respective seniority”.
This is the first time advocates have been designated after the Supreme Court in a judgment in 2023 modified its guidelines for ‘senior advocate’ designation to make the process transparent and fair.
The court had previously designated lawyers as senior advocates almost four years ago.
Over 280 lawyers had applied for the designation. Of them, 200 lawyers were shortlisted for the interview. Many of them are first-generation lawyers.
Among the successful lawyers are Additional Advocate General of Tamil Nadu Amit Anand Tiwari; the State’s panel counsel Joseph Aristotle S; Gaurav Agrawal, who has been amicus curiae of the apex court in several crucial cases like the Ajmal Kasab death plea, COVID orphans’ issue and the Maradu flats demolition in Kerala; P.B. Suresh, the lawyer who has argued against the electoral bonds scheme and who has appeared for the devotees in the Padmanabha Swamy temple case; Karuna Nundy, who appeared for one of the petitioners in the same-sex marriage case; Raghenth Basant, who appeared for medical students who had fled Ukraine and wanted to continue their education in India; Liz Mathew, who was standing counsel for Kerala; Mohd. Shoeb Alam, who had appeared for a student in the Karnataka hijab case; Sunil Fernandes and others.
Besides Ms. Gupta, Ms. Nundy and Ms. Mathew, the other women lawyers are Swarupama Chaturvedi, Uttara Babbar, Haripriya Padmanabhan, Archana Pathak Dave, Shirin Khajuria, N.S. Nappinai, S. Janani, and Nisha Bagchi.
