Breaking the Bar: Justice V. Mohana Becomes Only the Second Woman Ever Elevated Directly to India’s Supreme Court

By Muhammad Imran, Staff Member, SAHSOL-LUMS and Samia Azam Khan, LL.B from LUMS, LL. M from UK (SOAS) and Mona Malik, Ph. D (Scholar) SZABUL, Karahi

 On 2 June 2026, Senior Advocate V. Mohana was sworn in as a judge of the Supreme Court of India, becoming only the second woman in the Court’s history to be elevated directly from the Bar rather than through the conventional pathway of prior High Court service. Recommended by the Collegium led by Chief Justice Surya Kant on 27 May 2026, and notified by the Central Government a day before the ceremony, her appointment is a constitutionally recognised but historically uncommon mode of entry to the apex court, and one that carries implications well beyond her individual career.

Article 124 (3) of the Constitution of India, 1950 offers three routes to a Supreme Court appointment: at least five years of service as a High Court judge; at least ten years of practice as a High Court advocate; or, in the opinion of the President, the standing of a distinguished jurist. The framers deliberately kept the door open to the Bar and to academia, acknowledging that judicial excellence is not the exclusive preserve of those who have already served on the bench. In practice, however, direct appointments from the Bar have been vanishingly rare. Almost every judge on the Court has arrived via the High Court ladder. While the constitutional text has never restricted elevation from the Bar, the convention of promoting sitting judges has become so deeply embedded that departures from it are genuinely noteworthy.

The only precedent for a woman taking this path was Justice Indu Malhotra, appointed in 2018. In the eight years that separated the two appointments, no woman was elevated directly from the Bar to the Supreme Court. The Collegium’s recommendation noted that Justice Mohana’s appointment restores representation from the Bar in a court that is expected to draw professional diversity from both the judiciary and the practising profession. It was also notably the first time since August 2021 that the Collegium had recommended a woman judge to the apex court at all.

Before her elevation, Justice Mohana built a formidable advocacy practice before the Supreme Court. Her caseload ranged across family law, disability rights, and constitutional liberties. In Revanasiddappa v Mallikarjun (2023), she was part of proceedings in which the Court held that children born of marriages void under the Hindu Marriage Act are entitled to inherit a share of their parents’ ancestral and coparcenary property. In Sharmila Velamur v V. Sanjay (2025), she represented a mother whose adult son suffered from Ataxic Cerebral Palsy, securing a ruling that qualified medical expert opinion must carry significant weight when determining a disabled person’s capacity for independent decision-making. She also appeared in the bitterly contested Aishat Shifa v State of Karnataka (2022), the Hijab Ban case, representing teachers who argued in favour of a uniform dress policy in an appeal that produced a divided bench and prolonged national debate. The breadth and weight of these cases speak to the standard the Collegium applied when recommending her.

Justice Mohana becomes the twelfth woman to serve on the Supreme Court since it was constituted in 1950. That figure, set against seventy-six years of institutional history, tells its own story. The first woman to reach the apex court was Justice Fathima Beevi, appointed in 1989, nearly four decades after the Court first opened its doors to the public and to the wider legal profession. Progress since then has been fitful at best. There have been long stretches when only one woman sat on the bench simultaneously, and periods when the bench was entirely male once again. Of all twelve women appointed across more than seven decades, only two have come directly from the Bar. No woman has yet served as Chief Justice of India.

That last fact is expected to change in 2027. Justice B. V. Nagarathna, daughter of former Chief Justice E. S. Venkataramaiah and currently fifth in seniority on the bench, is projected under the Court’s prevailing seniority convention to assume the office of Chief Justice on 25 September 2027. She will hold it for exactly 36 days before her mandatory retirement on 29 October 2027. The brevity of that tenure is not a procedural anomaly; it is the direct and foreseeable consequence of a system in which women entered the legal profession later, were elevated to the bench later, and therefore accumulated the seniority that governs appointment to this office considerably later than their male counterparts, across decades of structural exclusion and institutional inertia. The glass ceiling, when it finally breaks, will shatter into a 36-day window.

The picture in Pakistan is strikingly parallel. As of June 2026, only two women have ever served as judges of the Supreme Court of Pakistan in a court that has existed since 1956. The first was Justice Ayesha A. Malik, who took her oath on 24 January 2022, becoming the first woman in Pakistan’s entire history to reach the apex court after the Judicial Commission of Pakistan approved her elevation from the Lahore High Court, where she had served since 2012. An LLM graduate of Harvard Law School and former corporate litigation partner, Justice Malik made her name through landmark High Court rulings on environmental justice and women’s rights, including a seminal judgment that outlawed the use of virginity tests in rape cases and set binding precedent across Pakistan’s provincial high courts. The second was Justice Mussarat Hilali, sworn in on 7 July 2023, who arrived at the Supreme Court after serving as the first female Chief Justice of the Peshawar High Court. Born in Peshawar in 1961 and a longtime human rights activist, she brought to the bench a distinguished career at the bar spanning over two decades of advocacy and civil society leadership. No woman has yet served as Chief Justice of Pakistan.

The constitutional frameworks of the two countries share certain foundations while diverging in significant ways. Both Article 124 of India’s Constitution and Articles 175A and 177 of Pakistan’s permit appointments from the Bar, and both require substantial prior legal experience as a baseline qualification. India, however, sets the advocacy threshold at ten years and uniquely recognises the category of the distinguished jurist, broadening the potential pool of appointees to include those whose contribution has been primarily scholarly or academic rather than judicial or forensic. Pakistan sets the threshold at fifteen years and contains no equivalent category whatsoever. India’s Collegium System places appointment power firmly within the senior judiciary itself, while Pakistan’s post-Eighteenth Amendment framework involves the Judicial Commission, the Parliamentary Committee, and the President in a layered process. The 26th and 27th Amendments have since tilted that balance further toward the executive, producing what legal scholars increasingly describe as a hybrid appointment system in which judicial independence over the composition of the bench has been meaningfully and structurally curtailed. In both countries, the Bar-to-Supreme Court route exists on paper; in practice, India uses it occasionally and Pakistan almost never.

Justice Mohana’s appointment is, in the end, three things at once. It is a constitutional affirmation that Article 124 means what it says, that the highest court can and should draw from the full range of distinguished legal talent, not only from those who have already passed through the High Court hierarchy. It is a professional recognition of a career of exceptional advocacy across some of the most consequential cases to reach the apex court in recent years. And it is a data point: the twelfth woman in seventy-six years, only the second from the Bar in the Court’s entire history, in a ledger that, read honestly, makes plain how far both South Asian judiciaries still have to travel before gender balance at the apex court stops being an occasion for remark, a subject of academic papers, and a source of persistent institutional embarrassment, and becomes, at last, unremarkable.