Supreme Court gets 5 new judges; strength increases to 37
One vacancy remains in the Supreme Court, which has a sanctioned strength of 38 judges; four judges are due to retire later this year
The Supreme Court on Tuesday got five new judges as Chief Justice of India Surya Kant administered the oath of office to Punjab and Haryana High Court Chief Justice Sheel Nagu and four others, including senior advocate V. Mohana, as judges of the top court.
The other three who administered the oath of office as Supreme Court judges were Bombay High Court Chief Justice Shree Chandrashekhar, Madhya Pradesh High Court Chief Justice Sanjeev Sachdeva and Jammu & Kashmir and Ladakh High Court Chief Justice Arun Palli.
Even after these elevations, one vacancy remains in the Supreme Court, which has a sanctioned strength of 38 judges. Four Supreme Court judges are due to retire later this year.
The oath ceremony was attended by the Supreme Court judges, lawyers and family members of the newly appointed judges, besides the Supreme Court Registry staff.
On May 27 May, the Supreme Court Collegium led by CJI Kant had recommended their elevation to the top court, barely 10 days after President Droupadi Murmu promulgated an Ordinance to increase the number of Supreme Court Judges from 34 to 38, including the CJI, following the Union Cabinet’s May 5 decision approving a proposal to increase the number of judges in the Supreme Court.
As Justice Mohana -- directly elevated from the Bar -- was administered the oath of office, advocates kept on clapping for almost a minute.
Justice Mohana’s appointment -- the first of a woman judge in the Supreme Court since August 2021 -- takes the number of women judges to two, including Justice BV Nagarathna.
After taking the oath, the newly appointed judges sat in three different Benches headed by Justice Vikram Nath, Justice PS Narasimha and Justice Dipankar Datta.
Born on January 1, 1965, Justice Nagu became an advocate in October 1987 and was appointed an additional judge of the Madhya Pradesh High Court in May 2011 and made a permanent judge in May 2013.
May 25, 1965-born Justice Chandrashekar obtained his law degree from Campus Law Centre of the Delhi University and enrolled as an advocate with the Delhi Bar Council in 1993. He was elevated as an additional judge of the Jharkhand High Court in January 2013 and became a permanent judge in June 2014.
Born on December 26, 1964, Justice Sachdeva graduated from Sri Ram College of Commerce and obtained his LL.B. degree from Campus Law Centre, Delhi University. He was appointed an additional judge of the Delhi High Court in April 2013 and became a permanent judge in March 2015.
Born in Patiala on September 18, 1964, Justice Palli graduated in law from Panjab University in 1988 and was appointed as a judge of the Punjab and Haryana High Court in December 2013.
Justice Mohana -- born on June 27, 1966 -- graduated from Coimbatore Law College, Tamil Nadu, in 1988. She became an advocate-on-record at the Supreme Court in 1996 and was designated a senior advocate by the Supreme Court in 2015.
She is the 12th woman judge in the history of the Supreme Court. Her predecessor women judges included Justices Fatima Beevi, Sujata Manohar, Ruma Pal, Gyan Sudha Mishra, Ranjana Desai, R Bhanumathi, Indu Malhotra, Indira Banerjee, Hima Kohli, Bela Trivedi and BV Nagarathna.
Justice Mohana is only the second woman in India to be directly elevated to the top court from the Bar after Justice Indu Malhotra in 2018 and the 11th advocate to be directly elevated to the Supreme Court. Earlier, Justices SM Sikri, SC Roy, Kuldip Singh, Santosh Hegde, Rohinton Nariman, UU Lalit, L Nageswara Rao, Indu Malhotra, PS Narasimha and KV Viswanathan were directly elevated from the Bar as Supreme Court judges.
