Critically examine the collegium system's tendency to favour conventional judicial/advocate pathways over the constitutionally envisaged route of eminent jurists to the Supreme Court.

Article 124(3) prescribes three routes to a Supreme Court judgeship — a High Court judge of five years, an advocate of ten years, or a "distinguished jurist" in the President's opinion [2]. The third has lain unused since 1950, a gap a sitting judge publicly flagged in 2026 [5].

The pattern of preference

• Nearly all judges are elevated from High Court benches, a smaller number directly from the Bar; not one appointment has been made under Article 124(3)(c) in over seven decades [5].
• The collegium — entrenched by the Judges cases and reaffirmed when the NJAC was struck down in 2015 for violating basic structure [4] — is composed of serving judges who assess candidates on familiar metrics: judgments authored, disposal record, seniority.
• The clause is enabling, not mandatory, and "distinguished jurist" is nowhere defined; no machinery exists to identify or nominate such persons [2].

Merits of the conventional route

• Prior courtroom experience builds skills the apex court needs — appreciation of evidence, case management, drafting enforceable orders.
• Assessment rests on a visible, verifiable record, limiting arbitrariness; an undefined jurist clause invites subjective or ideological selection.

Costs of the exclusion

• It defeats framers' intent: H.V. Kamath's motion of 24 May 1949 sought persons of "outstanding legal and juristic learning", expressly "not necessarily confined to Judges or Advocates" [1].
• The Bench loses the scholarly and comparative-law perspective academia offers on constitutional questions.
• The inconsistency is telling — the law does trust jurists elsewhere, including on the judge-removal inquiry committee under the Judges (Inquiry) Act, 1968 [3].
• No recorded reasons exist for the route's disuse, compounding criticism of collegium opacity.

The preference is institutionally rational but constitutionally impoverishing. Codifying objective criteria for "distinguished jurist" in the Memorandum of Procedure, and requiring the collegium to record why the route was not considered, would revive a dormant clause without diluting merit — realising the framers' vision of a Bench drawn from the widest pool of legal talent.