Chief Justice of India (CJI) Dipak Misra on Saturday advised judges of the Madras High Court to keep a watch on their conduct and avoid the practice of not being punctual to the court proceedings. He also sounded a word of caution against procrastinating the hearing in almost every other case.
In his presidential address at the 125th anniversary celebration of the Madras High Court building, the CJI said that judges must clearly understand that it was their obligation to commence the court proceedings on time. Equally, the lawyers were obligated to come prepared for arguing their cases.
“You know why? There is a reason for it,” the CJI said and went on to explain that “sitting on time and maintaining punctuality is a facet of rule of law. And rule of law is one of the basic features of the Constitution. If a judge does not sit on time and if a lawyer procrastinates, both of them violate the rule of law.”
Terming the practice of seeking adjournments as a disease, Mr. Justice Misra said: “When you ask for an adjournment, you must understand you are being killed by allergy. You should develop a sense of anti allergenic towards adjournments.” He insisted that lawyers should refuse to take adjournments even if judges were inclined to grant them.
“I must tell the judges, there is a book by Barrister Graeme Williams called ‘A short book of bad judges.’ That book describes what is a judge’s disease. And my simple advice to the honourable judges is: please don’t suffer from judges’ diseases. To understand what are such diseases, read that book and thereafter conduct yourself. It must be in the Madras High Court library,” he said.
Earlier, appreciating the beauty of the High Court building, the CJI turned nostalgic and recalled the days when he had visited the court complex as a 17-year-old tourist in 1970. “Today I have come here in a different capacity. It is a structurally impressive building without any ostentation.
“I would like to say that all of you together, along with members of the past, have injected life of justice into this imposing structure. It has become an epitome of constitutional justice which all of us cherish and treat it as the summum bonum [the highest good] of life and democracy,” he noted.
Warning against attempts to bring disrepute to the institution, he said: “One should constantly recapitulate that institutional reputation is based on immortality and no one can be allowed to harbour the notion that he can create any kind of hollowness in it. It is the institution that eventually matters, not any individual, not any lawyer or any judge or whosoever he may be.”
In his address, Union Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said that his focus across the country was to ensure disposal of cases that were more than 10 years old. He requested the Madras High Court to dispose of those cases in a mission mode since only 33,960 such cases were pending in the High Court and 44,721 in lower courts in the State as of December 31.
Death benefit hiked
Chief Minister Edappadi K. Palaniswami announced that the death benefit paid to the families of deceased advocates from the Advocates Welfare Fund would be increased from ₹ 5 lakh to ₹ 7 lakh. Supreme Court judges R.K. Agrawal, R. Banumathi and Sanjay Kishan Kaul, Chief Justice of Madras High Court Indira Banerjee, Attorney General K.K. Venugopal and Advocate General Vijay Narayan also spoke.
The CJI inaugurated a renovated standalone light house and the High Court museum as part of the celebrations. He also released a coffee table book on the heritage building of the High Court and handed over the first copy to Mr. Justice Agrawal.
