If mentioning goes on for an hour, how can we hear matters on board? Bombay High Court CJ Dipankar Datta

The Bombay High Court Chief Justice (CJ) Dipankar Datta on Wednesday expressed his disapproval at the insistence on the part of lawyers to orally mention cases for urgent listing..The CJ urged counsel to hand over precipes (urgent mentioning application) to the bench and not press for oral mentioning. "If we hear everyone (who has come to mention), then mentioning will go on for an hour! What happens to matters on board?” Chief Justice commented.The remarks came after a long line of lawyers queued up for oral mentioning with the Court finding that many such matters had no urgency. "We must play a broken record - ‘Handover your precipes (urgent mentioning application)!’ My learned brother checks all precipes to list matters! Why not trust the Court," the bench demanded. .As in most courts, in Bombay High Court too, the procedure that is followed for placing matters for urgent hearing, is to inform the Court about the urgency in the petition and ask for priority listing. However, the process of mentioning takes a long time depending on the roster of the Bench. The Chief Justice hears a wide range of cases public interest litigation petitions, writ petitions on infrastructure projects and cases arising out of proceedings before the Central Administrative Tribunal, Maharashtra Administrative Tribunal, Debt Recovery Tribunals, Debt Recovery Appellate Tribunals and matters pertaining to labour and service. Consequently, the CJ's Bench is faced with several urgent hearing applications on a daily basis. In order to reduce the time the Court has to spend on hearing every lawyer to make out a case for urgency, some benches including CJ's Bench which has directed lawyers to submit their written applications to the court associate. The Court later goes through the application and decides when to list the matter.