Supreme Court

Bayer has lost its case challenging the grant of India's first-ever compulsory licence to Natco Pharma to manufacture an affordable generic version of an anti-cancer drug, but the celebratory air has to be tempered. The issue of what constitutes "local working" of a patent in India remains, in general, unsettled. This article looks at the legality of local working requirements under the Agreement on Trade-related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights. It also analyses the interpretations of "working" by the Controller General of Patents, Designs and Trademarks, the Intellectual Property Appellate Board, and the Bombay High Court, and considers their broader implications.

The government needs to find a mechanism to ban child pornography, and not pornography as a whole, without appearing to be a censoring filter for content on the internet. 

Union Carbide Corporation managed to wrangle out of the Bhopal gas tragedy by exploiting a loophole in the Foreign Exchange Regulation Act. If governments are not vigilant, other companies, ushered for “Make in India”, would do the same.

Given that the Chief Justice of India composes panels and assigns cases to judges, unlike in systems where cases are randomly assigned to avoid bias or where apex constitutional courts sit in plenary sessions, the question of how the CJI is appointed is crucial. This article seeks to answer this question by empirically investigating whether the seniority norm existed prior to the establishment of the Supreme Court of India - specifically, in the high courts of Bombay, Calcutta, Madras, Allahabad, Patna, and in the Federal Court of India.

The question of judicial activism is once more in the limelight with two Supreme Court judges making observations on the "overreach" of the judiciary. This article examines the veracity of such observations and points out that the courts must intervene to enforce the rule of law and cannot remain mute spectators to the callousness of the executive class.