Man behind historic SC rulings, DY Chandrachud takes oath as 50th Chief Justice of India

Mangalore Today News Network / News18

New Delhi, Nov 09, 2022: Senior-most Supreme Court judge Dhananjaya Y Chandrachud took oath as the 50th Chief Justice of India (CJI) on Wednesday, succeeding Uday Umesh Lalit. President Droupadi Murmu administered the oath of office to DY Chandrachud at Rashtrapati Bhawan in Delhi.

 

Justice Chandrachud assumed charge as the 50th CJI and will have a tenure of over two years.

Born on November 11, 1959, Justice DY Chandrachud has served as the Additional Solicitor General of India in 1998. He was sworn in as the Chief Justice of the Allahabad High Court in 2013. He has been associated with the Bombay High Court too and was elevated as a judge in the Supreme Court in 2016.

Some of Justice DY Chandrachud’s notable judgments are on the Indian Constitution, comparative constitutional law, human rights, gender justice, public interest litigation, criminal laws and commercial laws.

Justice DY Chandrachud, during his tenure as a judge of the Supreme Court, overturned two judgments of his father YV Chandrachud who served as 16th Chief Justice of India. Chandrachud has been part of several Constitution benches and landmark verdicts of the top court including on matters relating to the Ayodhya land dispute, the right to privacy and adultery.

Justice DY Chandrachud succeeded Uday Umesh Lalit, who was in August appointed as the 49th Chief Justice of India (CJI) after President Droupadi Murmu signed his warrant of appointment.

Chandrachud’s illustrious father YV Chandrachud was the longest-serving CJI and remained at the helm from February 22, 1978 to July 11, 1985.

Justice DY Chandrachud, meanwhile, was also part of the benches which delivered path-breaking judgements on decriminalising same-sex relations after it partially struck down Section 377 of the IPC, the validity of the Aadhaar scheme and the 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".

Recently, he was among the two judges of the apex court Collegium which had objected to the method of “circulation" adopted for eliciting the views of its members on the appointment of judges to the top court.

After completing his BA with Honours in Economics from St Stephen’s College in Delhi, Justice Chandrachud did his LLB from Campus Law Centre, Delhi University, and obtained an LLM degree and a Doctorate in Juridical Sciences (SJD) from Harvard Law School, USA.

He practised law at the Supreme Court and the Bombay High Court and was a visiting professor of comparative Constitutional law at the University of Mumbai.

The Landmark Verdicts

-Ayodhya Title Suit

CJI DY Chandrachud was part of the five-judge Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court that, in a historic ruling on November 9, 2019, unanimously ruled that the disputed site at Ayodhya will go to Hindus and Muslims will get alternative land.

The five-judge Constitution Bench headed by then Chief Justice of India Ranjan Gogoi, comptising Justices DY Chandrachud, S Abdul Nazeer, Ashok Bhushan and SA Bobde, awarded the title to the deity, Shri Ram Virajman and directed the State to grant the Sunni Waqf Board an alternate site at Ayodhya for the construction of a mosque.

-Right to Privacy

In August 2017, a nine-judge Bench of the Supreme Court unanimously affirmed that the Constitution of India guarantees a fundamental right to privacy. Justice Chandrachud authored the majority decision in Justice K.S. Puttaswamy v Union of India speaking for himself and Khehar J, RK Agarwal J and Abdul Nazeer J.

He recognised the right to privacy and dignity as an intrinsic part of the right to life.

-Abortion Rights

The Supreme Court in September this year ruled that both married & unmarried women have the right to safe and legal abortion. A bench headed by Justice DY Chandrachud, and also comprising Justices AS Bopana and BV Nagrathna, held that every woman irrespective of its marital status are entitled to safe and legal abortion.

“The distinction between married and unmarried woman for the purposes of the MTP Act is artificial and constitutionally unsustainable and it perpetuates the stereotype that only married women indulges in sexual activities," the bench HAD said.

SC Judge Who Overturned Father’s Judgment

Justice D Y Chandrachud, during his tenure as a judge of the Supreme Court, overturned two judgments of his own father YV Chandrachud who served as 16th Chief Justice of India.

Justice Chandrachud overturned the judgements in Adultery and Right to Privacy

In the Adultery law, senior Chandrachud had upheld the validity of Section 497. Justice YV Chandrachud wrote the Sowmithri Vishnu judgment. Thirty-three years later, his son Justice DY Chandrachud while hearing the case had taken a dig saying, “We must make our judgments relevant to the present day".

“The law in adultery is a codified rule of patriarchy," Justice DY Chandrachud wrote in his judgment striking down the law.

In another such judgment upholding the right to privacy as a fundamental right, Justice DY Chandrachud who wrote the lead verdict in the Supreme Court’s landmark judgment overturned two previous verdicts on the hotly debated subject and overruled another judgment often described as the darkest hour in Indian judiciary.

In doing so he set aside the opinion of his father, Justice YV Chandrachud, in the controversial ADM Jabalpur case. The senior Chandrachud was among four out of five judges who in 1976 upheld a presidential order to impose Emergency in the country. The Congress was in power then.