New Delhi: It was indeed a day of history in Supreme Court.
The country’s top court handed Senior Advocate status to 11 women lawyers in a single day.
Compare that figure to 12 female lawyers having been given the status of Senior Advocate in all these years before Friday, and you can grasp the significance of the development.
The decision to promote 56 lawyers, including 11 women and 34 first-generation lawyers, was taken taken in a full-court meeting of the Supreme Court under the leadership of Chief Justice of India DY Chandrachud.
The 11 women lawyers are — Shobha Gupta, Swarupama Chaturvedi, Liz Mathew, Karuna Nundy, Uttara Babbar, Haripriya Padmanabhan, Archana Pathak Dave, Shirin Khajuria, NS Nappinai, S Janani, and Nisha Bagchi.
Among the first-generation lawyers to become Senior Advocates are Amit Anand Tiwari, Saurabh Mishra and Abhinav Mukherjee.
The first female lawyer to be made a Senior Advocate of Supreme Court was Justice Indu Malhotra in 2007, 57 years after the apex court came into existence. She later became a judge of Supreme Court.
In 2013, Meenakshi Arora, Kiran Suri and Vibha Dutta Makhija were made Senior Advocates, followed by two more — V Mohana and Mahalakshmi Pavani – in 2015.
In 2019, the Supreme Court gave Senior Advocate status to six women lawyers — Madhavi Dewan, Maneka Guruswamy, Anita Shenoy, Aparajita Singh, Aishwarya Bhati and Priya Hingorani.
