Chennai: In an apparent set back for AIADMK chief Jayalalithaa, the Madras High Court on Monday set aside an order of the Income Tax Settlement Commission (ITSC) accepting her application for disclosure of an amount Rs 1.72 crore for the assessment year 1998-99 under the Samadhan scheme.

The Supreme Court’s judgment that women will now be allowed to tend bars is unfortunate. Along with clearing the way for women to be hired as bartenders, the apex court has also reduced the age bar on all bartenders from 25 to 21 years.

Implicit in this judgment is a reduction in the drinking age, which in the capital as well as in large parts of the country is 25 years. The move is bound to create more problems for law enforcement officials and for society at large.

More than 11 years have elapsed since 1996 when the ethnic conflict between the Bodos and Adivasi in Kokrajhar and Chirang district of Bodoland Territorial Council, Assam forced hundreds of Adivasi families to be uprooted from their homes.

They are still languishing in the displaced camps in most un-imaginable living conditions. And now they are being tried to be uprooted from these camps even!

Status of Government Rehabilitation:
Successive state authorities have failed to rehabilitate the victims properly.

Justice must become central to the law curriculum, and community-based learning should give the desired value-orientation in the making of a lawyer. Professional education will have to be imbibed with a spirit of social service. There is no better way of inculcating it except through exposing law students to real-life experiences crying out for justice, Chief Justice of the Madras High Court A.P. Shah said on Monday.

Forest Gumption

* The Union ministry of environment and forests feels defining forests will help it identify and protect them better. Critics feel limiting the meaning would free forest land for commercial use.
* There is no definition of a forest in Indian law but a Supreme Court order enables the "dictionary sense" of the word to qualify as one of the parameters
* The MoEF wants to do away with this broad criterion. Critics fear that several forests which have not been notified will be released for commercial purposes.

CITING THE big noise from India about a simple crowd control exercise that had not resulted in a single injury, the Malaysian PM suspected that HINDRAF’s bigger motive might be to cause chaos and disturb the peace in the country. Shockingly, there seems to be some substance in the apprehension of a larger conspiracy working behind the protest by ethnic Indians in Malaysia.

Foreign law firms are gearing up to enter the Indian market. But the government is flip-flopping on allowing them to set up shop here, reports Seetha

The face off continues. On November 20, the Bombay High Court postponed hearing a case about foreign law firms doing business in India to December 15. Three days later, the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) held a closed-door meeting on the issue in Delhi, with commerce ministry officials and lawyers (both supporters and opponents of the move) in order to find a meeting ground. That didn’t help, either.

Lawyers boycotted the civil courts here on Tuesday protesting against the reported move to make Hindi the language of judgments in higher courts.

The boycott was part of a two-day strike call given by the local Bar Association, its President M Rajakumar said.

A delegation of Democratic Progressive Alliance (DPA), including ministers and MPs of the DMK, Congress and PMK, had on November 28 met Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and urged him to immediately stop the move.

A city court Friday sentenced 19 lawyers to six months of rigorous imprisonment for not abiding by a high court directive to not go on strike. They were granted bail soon after the verdict.

Metropolitan Magistrate Sandeep Yadav Friday held the lawyers guilty and sentenced them to a maximum punishment of six months.

In 2005, the Delhi High Court had booked the lawyers under section 144 of the Indian Penal Code (joining unlawful assembly) for holding a massive strike over the inauguration of a new district court at Rohini.

Kiran Bedi's voluntary exit from the police force affirms what many of us knew all along - that career women run up against a glass ceiling. Demotivated by the fact that she was overlooked for the post of police commissioner of Delhi four months ago, she decided to call it a day. Bedi had good reasons to believe that she lost out only because she was a woman. It is not just that she did not have a network of "booze friends" to swing things her way; her exceptional competence worked to her disadvantage.