New Delhi
Supreme Court Judge Dhananjaya Yeshwant Chandrachud, who will be the 50th Chief Justice of India for two years from Nov 2024, has set a new record of writing orders on his laptop instead of dictating to the court masters, to reduce the chances of a Covid infection.
The tech-savvy judge is also the chairman of the SC’s e-Committee that approved the software for the judges to write their notes on laptops and retrieval of soft copies. He hoped other judges too will adopt the safe method and become less dependent on the staff.
Son of the late Yeshwant Vishnu Chandrachud, who was the longest serving CJI for eight years from 1978 to 1985, he did his LLB from Delhi. He was a Bombay High Court judge and a former Chief Justice of the Allahabad HC before becoming the SC judge in 2016. He said he liked typing the order himself since the order becomes accurate and precise, not requiring corrections.
Currently, there are two court masters on each bench who take orders in shorthand and then submit the typed copy to the judges for corrections. In the process, the court masters have to interact with judges multiple times thus raising the risk of infection to either. Both sons of Dr Chandrachud are also lawyers and authors of several books. His son Abhinav (32) practises in Bombay HC and has done LLM from Harvard Law School where his father had also studied, while his 31-year-old brother Chintan is a doctorate from the University of Cambridge and works with a law firm in London.
