-The Hindu We live in a legal environment where the rule of sub judice is regarded as an anachronism, emanating from a time when all trials were decided by jurors susceptible to influence by what was published in the press. By and large, the law of sub judice, which regulates the dissemination of matter under the consideration of the court, is a dead letter. In such a context, the Supreme Court’s...

-The Indian Express Concerned about instances of reporting that breached confidentiality and threatened to hurt litigants, the Supreme Court has been, for a while, contemplating the way to regulate the journalistic coverage of ongoing cases. While the court has done well to refuse to lay down any overarching rule for all sub-judice cases, it did make a significant and troubling change by allowing a case-by-case appeal for postponing media coverage. Essentially,...

-The Economic Times "Sedition" is a legal construct from less enlightened times, when the sovereign power claimed a divine sanction and subjects were expected to live in awe and fear. So what is republican India doing, in its seventh decade, in bringing a charge of sedition against a self-publishing cartoonist with a propensity for scatology and lurid imagery? A convulsive attack of folly that the agencies of the Indian state have...

-The Times of India HYDERABAD: Is Bt Brinjal safe? The demonisation of BT crops got a push with the parliamentary committee on agriculture in its report submitted last month commenting that transgenics in food crops would be fraught with unknown consequences. But the Hyderabad-based National Institute of Nutrition (NIN) of the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) says that Bt Brinjal is safe. A voluminous report on the laboratory experiments carried out...

-PTI The Supreme Court on Tuesday refused to frame guidelines across the board for reporting sub-judice matters but laid down a constitutional principle under which aggrieved parties can seek postponement of publication of court hearings. A five-judge bench headed by Chief Justice S H Kapadia said it was laying down the constitutional principle which will allow the aggrieved parties to seek from appropriate court the postponement of the publication of court hearings. The...