Don't Publish Names of Advocates or Judges - High Court Tells Publications

By Vijay Kumar

MANY publications, when reporting court cases, often publish the names of the judges who decided the case and some tax publications even publish/highlight the names of the advocates who argued the case. This is a sort of publicity/advertisement for the lawyers. We in TIOL also get requests from lawyers to carry remarks that the case was argued by …., which we normally don't oblige.

The Madurai Bench of the Madras High Court last week frowned on this practice. The Court observed,

Often times, we have been noticing that the Print and Electronic Media is carrying on publication of the names of legal practitioners as well as the names of the Judges of the High Court concerned, who dealt with particular cases, publication of names of practitioners who may have appeared for one party or the other in a particular case can lead to an indirect method of soliciting or indulging in advertisement of the professional abilities or skills of the advocates. We, therefore, direct the Registrar (Administration) of this Bench to immediately circulate instructions to all Print, Electronic and Media Houses not to publish the names of the practitioners as part of news item.

We also direct, for the present, the Registrar (Administration) to request the Print, Electronic and Media House, not to publish the individual names of the Judges unless it is so essentially required. The reason being every Judge of the High Court is carrying on with his work sitting in a particular division/roster as assigned by My Lord The Hon'ble Chief Justice. The Judges do perform their duties dispassionately and to the extent possible by not allowing their individual notions and philosophies to be a guiding factor in deciding the causes brought before them. Therefore, we feel that the names of the Judges should not be published and on the other hand, the name of the High Court alone should be published.

Ironically, while reporting this case even top newspapers like the Hindu and agencies like UNI mentioned the names of the Judges who delivered this judgement asking publications to desist from carrying the names of judges.

A Tribunal Judge was very angry with me for reporting a High Court case in which the Judge was the appellant and the judgement contained certain disparaging remarks against the judge in his confidential report which were eventually expunged. We couldn't report the case without mentioning the judge's name!

See 2016-TIOL-1888-HC-MAD-MISC