Law and Literature

  The issue of "seat" and "venue" in arbitration proceedings is no longer res integra . Section 20 of the Arbitration and Conciliation Act, 1996 (the Act) stipulates the place of arbitration as follows: “20. Place of arbitration.— (1) The parties are free to agree on the place of arbitration.  (2) Failing any agreement referred to in sub-section (1), the place of arbitration shall be determined by the arbitral tribunal having regard to the circumstances of the case, including the convenience of the parties. (3) Notwithstanding sub-section (1) or sub-section (2), the arbitral tribunal may, unless otherwise agreed by the parties, meet at any place it considers appropriate for consultation among its members, for hearing witnesses, experts or the parties, or for inspection of documents, goods or other property.” The critical distinction between Section 20(1)/(2) (the "seat") and Section 20(3) (the "venue") was established by the Supreme Court in the ...

PRELUDE Writes Francis Bacon in his philosophical piece Of Death "It is as natural to die, as to be born; and to a little infant, perhaps, the one is as painful, as the other". He tries to convince his readers that death is natural and an inevitable process and should not be feared.   But it is also the natural Human tendency (at least in most of us) to fear, fight or if possible, cheat death and not accept it so easily even though our religions preaches the otherwise that death is just another phase of life. Dylan Thomas in his great poem Do not go gentle into the good night pens " rage rage against the dying of the light."    pleading his fellow readers to fight death and not accept it easily although death is inevitable.  But when severe medical condition bleeds one from the brain to the bone, mercilessly everyday slowing death in the most painful manner. Does one still fight or accept death? Either ways there is extreme agony with tormented co...

Long have I been They were to wait. They searched for me all day while I was in the woods far away. Seasons came and ended Snow softened with the smell of spring. The mosses grew as the years blew and they still anticipate with a sigh.  I am a shadow in the doorway now the contours of my absence already painted in the streets long have they been waiting  with lost hopes of my returning.

The SARFASESI Act, 2002 has gone through a paradigm of shifts, the one practical lacuna that all litigants face is the 30 days time granted to the borrower for the right to redemption. As per the procedure envisaged in the act, the secured creditor takes possession of the immovable property and proceeds to issue a notice of sale under Rule 8(6) for the sale of the immovable property. The aggrieved borrowers usually take the recourse under section 17 of the Act and one of the most common grounds taken is ‘the illegal measures/ procedures undertaken by the bank in the non compliance of providing a 30 days period from the date of issuance of sale notice as mandated by the Act’. The practice that was usually and widely being followed was that there was multiple issuance of a sale notice under Rule 8(6) of the SARFESI rule. An individual sale notice was first served to the borrower along with affixation in the said immovable property and after thirty-days gap, another sale notice for public...

“Natural justice necessitates full hearing, not a flood of words of forbidding length.” – Justice Krishna Iyer.  As students of law, we often get weary of reading long expositions in judgments addressing minor or pre-determined issues. The true art of judgment writing should be brief and well articulated but the same must not be at the cost of clarity. In India’s current judicial scenario, the pronouncement of lengthy judgments has become a commonplace, and there has been a growing concern with the copy-and-paste trend in the Indian Judiciary that has been critically viewed by many jurists and practitioners worldwide.  The true essence of judgeship resonates when the clarification, elucidation, and explanations of law with the rationality of facts are abbreviated and crisp. The great Justice Iyer in K. Kalpana Saraswathi v. P.S.S. Somasundaram Chettiar  (1980) 1 SCC 630   while considering an appeal that consisted of voluminous Judicial manuscripts and arguments, di...