A Jurist Of Liberty, Dignity, And Rights
- IJLLR Journal
- 1 day ago
- 2 min read
Vandan Pareek, Symbiosis Law School, Hyderabad
INTRODUCTION
Justice Yeshwant Vishnu Chandrachud was a jurist and the epitome of intellectual brilliance and adherence to constitutional ideological principles. He was born on 12 July 1920, in Pune, and served as one of the most influential Chief Justices in the history of India, holding the longest tenure of Chief Justice in independent India or the whole world between 22 February 1978 and 11 July 1985. He was a contemporary of a period of turbulence, as the courts were only getting their feet above the ground since the Emergency, and were obliged at once to make a tentative step, and an aggressive assertion of constitutional authority. Chandrachud attended the Elphinstone College, ILS Law College, Pune and began his legal practice in Bombay and became a Supreme Court Judge in 1972. The art with which his career was characterized was that of maintaining the independence of the judiciary in a system of political manipulation, the revival of the judiciary as the guarantee of the rule of the constitution.
Chandrachud not only decided in one of the earliest contested cases (the case of ADM Jabalpur, to which he appealed his arguments about the suspension of habeas corpus during the Emergency) but also, in subsequent decisions, restored the constitutional values and independence of the judiciary. The case of Minerva Mills made the point of the importance of the constitutional form of fundamentalism concrete and reaffirmed the need to constrain the Parliamentary power by the democratic factors necessary. His ruling in the Shah Bano case was equally very relevant on the ground that it put constitutional gender justice in outright clash with basic religious personal laws. Justice Chandrachud, on his part, showed the orthodoxy and audacity in a rare combination-the deep knowledge of the law tradition and a pioneering step towards liberal constitutionalism. The other notable contribution of his rule was to restore the Supreme Court to the role of the protector of the constitution of a country, through which the creation of an efficient judiciary, founded on the principles of justice, equality, and the rule of law, has been achieved.
