Justice Dhananjaya Y Chandrachud, the senior most judge of the Supreme Court, was on Monday appointed the 50th Chief Justice of India. Justice Chandrachud, who will serve as the CJI for two years, will be sworn-in on November 9. He succeeds Justice UU Lalit, who is due to retire on November 8 after a brief tenure of 74 days. The appointment comes after CJI Lalit had on October 11 recommended to the Centre the name of Justice Chandrachud as his successor.
In exercise of the power conferred by the Constitution of India, Hon'ble President appoints Dr. Justice DY Chandrachud, Judge, Supreme Court as the Chief Justice of India with effect from 9th November, 22.
— Kiren Rijiju (@KirenRijiju) October 17, 2022
— Kiren Rijiju (@KirenRijiju) Justice Chandrachud is the son of the longest serving CJI YV Chandrachud. His father was the 16th Chief Justice of India and served for over 7 years between 1978 and 1985. The CJI-designate was part of the benches that delivered major judgements on decriminalising same-sex relations after it partially struck down Section 377 of the IPC, validity of the Aadhaar scheme and Sabarimala issue.
Recently, a bench headed by him expanded the scope of the Medical Termination of Pregnancy(MTP) Act and the corresponding rules to include unmarried women for abortion between 20-24 weeks of pregnancy. The Justice Chandrachud-led bench had also passed several directions to assuage the miseries faced by people during the COVID-19 crisis, terming the brutal second wave of the pandemic last year as a “national crisis”.
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In a landmark verdict delivered in February 2020, a bench headed by Justice Chandrachud had directed that women officers in the Army be granted permanent commission and command postings, rejecting the Centre’s stand of their physiological limitations as being based on “sex stereotypes” and “gender discrimination against women”. He was also part of the five-judge Constitution bench which dealt with the Ayodhya case.
In July this year, the Justice Chandrachud-led bench had ordered release of Alt News Co-founder Mohammad Zubair on interim bail in all the FIRs lodged in Uttar Pradesh against him for alleged hate speech, saying “exercise of the power of arrest must be pursued sparingly” and transferred all the cases in UP to Delhi.