Chief Justice Ritu Raj Awasthi of the High Court of Karnataka on Friday said that he enjoyed practising law as an advocate than his service as a judge.
“I thoroughly enjoyed my law practise and I dealt with many important and challenging cases. I candidly confess that the satisfaction it [practice of law as an advocate] gave was perhaps even more in comparison to my service as a judge,” he said at the farewell given to him by the High Court and the Karnataka State Bar Council on the eve of his retirement.
Justice Awasthi, who led a three-judge Bench that had delivered the path-breaking judgment of declaring that “wearing of hijab by Muslim women does not form part of essential religious practice in Islamic faith”, described Karnataka as reflection of unity in diversity and rightly referred as “one State and many worlds”.
Future of judiciary
Terming young lawyers as the future of the judiciary, he said that they must be devoted to the profession of an advocate and should be honest to oneself, hard working, and humble towards others in order to be successful and meaningful legal practitioners.
62-year-old Justice Awasthi, who hails from Lucknow in Uttar Pradesh, was elevated as judge of the High Court of Allahabad in 2009 and took over as the Chief Justice of the High Court of Karnataka on October 11, 2021.
