Committee for Designation of Senior Advocates seeks views on 105 applicants

The Committee for Designation of Senior Advocates (CDSA), birthed after the Supreme Court’s decision in Indira Jaising v. Supreme Court of India and others, has released a list of 105 applicants, seeking recommendations on whether or not they should be designated as Senior Advocates..The CDSA had published a notice inviting applications for designation as Senior Advocates in August this year. Now that the list of applicants has been published, the stakeholders in the process have been invited to make suggestions on the same. Such suggestions/views, the notice states, must be accompanied by verifiable and must be submitted to the Secretariat of the CDSA within 15 days..Once the Secretariat compiles the suggestions of stakeholders, the information is required to be submitted to a permanent committee. This committee will review the same, call the applicant for an interview, and give its overall assessment on the basis of a point-based format. All names cleared by the committee will go before the Full Court, which will vote on the names..The list of applicants published by the CDSA includes Advocate General for Chhattisgarh Jugal Kishore Gilda, former Additional Advocate General of Punjab and NLSIU graduate Nikhil Nayyar, BJP Spokesperson Gaurav Bhatia, Madhavi Divan, Menaka Guruswamy, Gopal Sankaranarayanan, Mohan Katarki, Nakul Dewan, Priya Hingorani, ML Sharma and Aishwarya Bhati, among others..The last time the Court made senior designations from the Bar was in April 2015. Subsequently, a petition for streamlining the procedure for designating lawyers as Senior Advocates came to be filed in the Supreme Court by Senior Advocate Indira Jaising. The Court then refrained from designating lawyers as Senior Advocates during the pendency of the case. However, no designations were made even after the judgment was pronounced by the Court..In September, two years later, the Supreme Court conferred the Senior gown on twenty-five retired High Court judges..Read the notice: