Satya Prakash
New Delhi, November 20
Chief Justice of India (CJI) DY Chandrachud has urged senior advocates not to treat their juniors as slaves and pay them decent salaries, saying this kind of practice must change. “For far too long, we have regarded youngsters in our profession as slave workers. Because that is how we grew uphellip;This is the old ragging principle in Delhi University that those who were ragged, would always go on to rag people who were below them. It was like passing on the blessings of being ragged,” said Justice Chandrachud, who took over as the 50th CJI on November 9.
Speaking at a function organised by the Bar Council of India (BCI) to felicitate him on Saturday evening, Justice Chandrachud said, “Some young lawyers do not even have chambers where they are paid money…If you are staying in Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru or Kolkata, how much does it cost for a young lawyer to survive? They have rent to pay, transportation, foodhellip;This must change, and the burden of doing that is on us, as senior members of the profession.” He even narrated a personal anecdote when a classmate had asked him during his Campus Law Centre days as to what he would do after LLB and how he would survive in the legal profession.
“While you have top-notch lawyers in the Supreme Court who would have seven or eight videoconferencing screens open so they can move from one court to another with a click of the mouse, yet you have lawyers, who had to virtually live from hand to mouth during the pandemic,” the CJI said. He said, “This structure of the legal profession, which is patriarchal and sometimes caste-basedhellip; it has to change so that we, as lawyers, discharge our duties to our society to make the legal profession open up to people from different communities and marginalised groups in our society.”
