President Droupadi Murmu on Monday appointed Justice Dhanajaya Yeshwant Chandrachud as the 50th Chief Justice of India.
Justice Chandrachud will succeed CJI U U Lalit, who is due to retire on November 8.
“In exercise of the powers conferred by clause (2) of Article 124 of the Constitution of India, the President is pleased to appoint Dr Justice Dhananjaya Yeshwant Chandrachud, Judge of the Supreme Court, to be the Chief Justice of India with effect from 9 November, 2022,” the government notification said.
Justice Chandrachud will have a relatively longer tenure of two years and is due to retire on November 10, 2024 — this will be the CJI longest tenure in almost a decade.
President Appoints Justice DY Chandrachud As Next Chief Justice Of India
A Law graduate from Delhi University, Justice Chandrachud got his LLM degree and a Doctor of Juridical Science from Harvard Law School.
He practised law at the Bombay High Court and Supreme Court and was designated a senior advocate by the Bombay High Court in June 1998. He served as Additional Solicitor General from 1998 until his appointment as a judge of Bombay High Court on March 29, 2000. He was also director of the Maharashtra Judicial Academy.
Justice Chandrachud took over as the Chief Justice of Allahabad High Court on October 31, 2013, and was appointed a judge of the Supreme Court on May 13, 2016.
During his tenure in SC, he penned crucial verdicts, including the landmark Constitution Bench rulings recognising privacy as a fundamental right, decriminalising homosexuality, and decriminalising adultery, among others.
A bench led by him had passed several directions to assuage miseries faced by people during the Covid-19 crisis, terming the brutal second wave of the pandemic last year as a “national crisis”.
Recently, Justice Chandrachud was among the two judges of the SC Collegium which had objected to the method of “circulation” adopted for eliciting the views of its members on the appointment of judges to the top court.