CJI Ranjan Gogoi recommends Justice SA Bobde as his successor
18 Oct 2019
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Chief Justice of India Ranjan Gogoi, who will demit office on 17 November 2019, has sent a letter to the centre recommending Justice SA Bobde, who is next in seniority, as his successor.
Justice Bobde, who will be sworn in as CJI on 18 November, will have a tenure of about 18 months.
Bobde is a former chief justice of the Madhya Pradesh High Court, and is due to retire on 23 April 2021. He was elevated as a Supreme Court judge on 12 April 2013.
Justice Bobde received his Bachelor of Arts and law degrees from Nagpur University. In 1978, Bobde enrolled into the Bar Council of Maharashtra. He practised at the Nagpur Bench of the Bombay High Court for several years and was designated as a senior advocate in 1998.
In March 2000, he was elevated to the Bombay High Court bench as an additional judge. Bobde was sworn in as Madhya Pradesh High Court Chief Justice in October 2012.
Chief Justice Gogoi, who was sworn in as the 46th Chief Justice of India on 3 October 2018, had a tenure of 13 months and 15 days while Justice Bobde, who will be sworn in as CJI on 18 November, will have a tenure of about 18 months.
As per the practice, the sitting chief justice has to write a recommendation for his successor. The CJI has gone by the convention to recommend the name of the next senior judge after him as his successor.
According to the Memorandum of Procedure for the appointment of members of the higher judiciary, “appointment to the office of the Chief Justice of India should be of the senior-most judge of the Supreme Court considered fit to hold the office“.
Under this process, after receiving the CJI’s recommendation, the law minister puts it before the Prime Minister who advises the president on the matter.
