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When Supreme Court judges adopted a resolution a decade ago to make a periodic declaration of their assets to the Chief Justice of India, they took care to state that the details of their holdings would not be made public.

We take the optimistic view that successive Chief Justices of India shall he nceforth act in accordance with the Second Judge's case and this opinion,' Justice S.E Bharucha said on October 28, 1998, delivering the Supreme Court's advisory opinion on the President's Reference. The Court ruled in that case (in 1993) that the CJI must consult two other judges before recommending judges for appointment to the Supreme Court and the High Courts. Justice Bharucha himself ignored the court's rulings after he became CJI on November 1, 2001.

A day after the Supreme Court refused to order a judicial inquiry into the allegations of misconduct against former Chief Justice of India YK Sabharwal, top jurists said on Tuesday, that many legal options were available to initiate a probe into the matter.

In 1993, a nine -judge bench of the Supreme Court laid down a new system for making appointments of judges to the high courts and Supreme Court. This system gave enormous powers to a collegium of senior judges of the Supreme Court to select and make recommendations to the government for these appointments.

The stature of the judicature is so high and its powers so wide that any action designed to debunk, defile or denigrate the great dignity and impartial integrity of the institution is regarded as an invasion on the people’s faith in the court’s fearless, biasfree, favour-free functionalism and its solemn credibility as a constitutional
instrumentality of justice.

Scandals can be fun. Especially those that knock preachers from their pulpits and flick halos off saintly heads. But some scandals can be corrosive and more damaging for the scandalised than the scandalee. Right now we're in the midst of one such.

Are judges special or is justice special? To put it differently, can you criticise a judge without imperiling the sanctity of justice? This is the core concern at the heart of the debate whether freedom of speech should have primacy over the law on contempt.

In a dramatic throwback to civil disobedience, over 30 prominent persons have decided to “court contempt” daring the judiciary to punish them along with Mid Day journalists for making allegations against former Chief Justice Y K Sabharwal.