JUSTICE DHANANJAYA Y. CHANDRACHUD

Justice Dhananjaya Yeshwant Chandrachud was born in 1959 and is the son of YV Chandrachud, the longest-serving Chief Justice of India. He completed his LLB from Delhi University and went to Harvard for his LLM.

He was appointed a judge of the Supreme Court of India on May 13, 2016 until 2024.He was also the Chief Justice of the Allahabad High Court from October 31, 2013, until appointment to the Supreme Court. Before this, he was also a judge in the Bombay High Court from March 29, 2000.Justice Chandrachud was also appointed as the director of the Maharashtra Judicial Academy.

Apart from law, he was also a visiting professor of Comparative Constitutional Law at the University of Mumbai and the Oklahoma University School of Law, US. He has also given lectures across prestigious international universities like Harvard Law School, Yale Law School, Australian National University and the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa. Justice DY Chandrachud was also a speaker at conferences organized by bodies of the United Nations including United Nations High Commission on Human Rights, International Labour Organisation and United Nations Environmental Programme, the World Bank and Asian Development Bank.

Justice DY Chandrachud held adultery as a relic of the past and struck down the law. Justice DY Chandrachud, in his latest judgment, overturned his father Justice YV Chandrachud’s 1985 ruling that held the adultery law to be constitutionally valid. Justice DY Chandrachud said Section 497 destroyed women’s dignity and self-respect as to treat them as their husbands’ chattel and offended their sexual freedom.

However, this is not the first time that Justice DY Chandrachud has overturned rulings that were ancient and meaningless in today’s time. He overruled his father’s 1976 ruling according to which right to privacy was not a fundamental right for citizens of India. He has also delivered many other judgments that have made a great difference to our society and have changed many people’s lives.