Constituent Assembly debates reflect a deliberate widening of the talent pool for the higher judiciary. Assess whether this intent has been realised in practice.

Article 124(3) offers three routes to the Supreme Court Bench — five years as a High Court judge, ten years as a High Court advocate, or being a "distinguished jurist" in the President's opinion [1]. Seventy-six years on, the third route remains a dead letter, showing that the framers' widening intent survives on paper but not in practice.

The Assembly's intent: a consciously wider pool

• The jurist clause was inserted on H.V. Kamath's motion (24 May 1949), so that eligibility was not "confined to Judges or Advocates" but open to outstanding legal and juristic learning [2].
• Ambedkar did not oppose it in principle, questioning only whether "eminent" read better than "distinguished" — indicating settled agreement on the widening itself [2].
• Unlike the other two routes, no minimum experience is prescribed, a deliberate flexibility meant to accommodate scholars [1].

The intent substantially unrealised

• Zero appointments have been made under this clause since 1950; no legal academic has entered the Court through it [2].
• The clause is enabling, not mandatory — "in the opinion of the President" confers discretion without any institutional push [1].
• The Constitution neither defines "distinguished jurist" nor creates machinery to identify or nominate one, unlike the structured judge and advocate channels [2].
• The collegium, restored when the 99th Amendment and NJAC were struck down in 2015 [3], draws from a settled pipeline of serving judges and senior advocates, leaving academia outside its field of vision [4].

Signs of course correction

• A sitting judge, Justice Ujjal Bhuyan (NLU Delhi, 2026), has publicly called the clause an unused mandate, signalling institutional introspection [2].

Thus the framers' pluralist design has been narrowed by practice rather than by amendment. Reviving it needs modest steps — articulating criteria for "distinguished jurist" in the Memorandum of Procedure and requiring the collegium to consider academic names alongside conventional ones. Restoring this third route would fulfil Article 124's original promise of a Bench enriched by scholarship as much as by advocacy.