New Delhi
\nThere is no doubt that the Chief Justice of India is the \u201cmaster of roster\u201d, the Supreme Court said on Friday, reiterating that it\u2019s his prerogative and authority to allocate cases to fellow judges and Benches. In separate but concurring judgments, Justice AK Sikri and Justice Ashok Bhushan reiterated the legal position on the issue. The top court dismissed former Law Minister Shanti Bhushan\u2019s petition seeking guidelines to regulate the CJI\u2019s administrative powers.<\/p>\n
The roster issue has been in the news since January 12 when four senior-most judges Justices J Chelameswar, Ranjan Gogoi, MB Lokur and Kurian Joseph addressed the media to highlight their grievances over the manner of allocation of cases by CJI Misra. Several senior advocates who argued against the CJI\u2019s power to allocate cases wanted the Collegium to be involved in the process.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs far as the role of Chief Justice is concerned, there is no dispute that he is the master of roster and has authority to allocate cases to different SC Benches,\u201d Justice Sikri wrote.<\/p>\n
Bhushan had contended that \u2018master of roster\u2019 cannot be an \u201cunguided and unbridled\u201d discretionary power, exercised arbitrarily by the CJI by hand-picking Benches of select judges or by assigning cases to particular judges. He had questioned the \u201cabsolute discretion\u201d given to the CJI in deciding the roster.<\/p>\n
Rejecting his contention, the Bench made it clear that the CJI did not have to consult the SC Collegium while allocating work. The top court described the CJI as \u201cfirst among equals\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
New Delhi There is no doubt that the Chief Justice of India is the \u201cmaster of roster\u201d, the Supreme Court said on Friday, reiterating that it\u2019s his prerogative and authority to allocate cases to fellow judges and Benches. In separate but concurring judgments, Justice AK Sikri and Justice Ashok Bhushan reiterated the legal position on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":36371,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[312],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-36370","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-india"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36370","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36370"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36370\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36372,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36370\/revisions\/36372"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/36371"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36370"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36370"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36370"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}