Today marks Chief Justice D.Y. Chandrachud’s final day at the Supreme Court. Appointed to the apex court in 2016, he assumed the role of Chief Justice in November 2022. His distinguished tenure has been defined by landmark judgments across a broad spectrum of legal issues.
His judgments have addressed critical issues such as privacy, bodily autonomy, federalism, affirmative action, and arbitration. Throughout his tenure, he served on 1,275 benches and authored 613 judgments, with at least 500 of those coming during his time as a puisne judge.
Here are the top 5 Judgements :
1) Fundamental Right to Privacy:
In the said judhement, Justice Chandrachud held that privacy was an “intrinsic part of the right to life and personal liberty under Article 21, and part of the freedoms guaranteed under Part III of the Constitution.” The Court relied on this case to arrive at its landmark decisions to decriminalise adultery and homosexuality.
2) Decriminalising homosexuality:
On 6 September 2018, a unanimous five-judge bench partially struck down Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, 1860, a provision that decriminalized same-sex relations between consenting adults. However, the Court clarified that the part of Section 377 dealing with bestiality would remain in effect.
In his concurring opinion, which was the longest among all the judgments in the decision, Justice Chandrachud emphasized that Section 377 had pushed a certain group of citizens to the margins of society. Drawing from his earlier judgment in Puttaswamy, which recognized the fundamental right to privacy, he highlighted that the denial of the right to sexual orientation amounted to a violation of privacy. He argued that human sexuality should not be confined to a binary formulation and cannot be narrowly defined solely in terms of procreation.
3) Decriminalisation of Adultery:
On 27 September 2018, a five-judge bench led by then Chief Justice Dipak Misra unanimously decriminalized adultery under Section 497 of the Indian Penal Code, 1860. This provision had made it a punishable offense for a man to engage in sexual intercourse with another man’s wife. The bench ruled that the provision violated Articles 14, 15, and 21 of the Constitution, declaring it archaic and paternalistic. They noted that the section infringed upon a woman’s autonomy and dignity, as it treated her as a mere property of her husband rather than as an independent individual with rights.
While the majority opinion was penned by Justice Misra, in a separate concurring opinion, Justice D.Y. Chandrachud wrote that “the law in adultery is a codified rule of patriarchy” and it perpetrated the regressive idea of the “subordinate nature of women in a marriage.”
4) Ayodhya Title Dispute:
On 9 November 2019, a five-judge bench, including Justice Chandrachud, unanimously awarded the disputed Ayodhya title to the deity Shri Ram Virajman. The bench also directed the Uttar Pradesh government to provide the Sunni Waqf Board with an alternate site in Ayodhya for the construction of a mosque.
The judgment, which spanned 1,045 pages, was a per curiam decision, meaning it was written on behalf of the entire Court, and the author of the judgment remained anonymous. The Court overturned the 2010 decision of the Allahabad High Court, which had divided the title equally between Nirmohi Akhara, the U.P. Sunni Central Board of Waqfs, and Shri Ram Virajman. The judgment acknowledged that the demolition of the Babri Masjid on 6 December 1992 by kar sevaks was a “serious violation of law.”
5) Sabarimala Temple Entry:
On 28 September 2018, a 4:1 majority held that denying women of menstruating age entry into the Sabarimala temple was unconstitutional. Such practice, the bench held, violated women’s fundamental rights to freedom of religion, equality and liberty.
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