From the Bench of the Supreme Court to the Parul University Classroom: Justice Rajesh Bindal Joins Parul Institute of Law as Distinguished Honorary Professor of Law

The journey of Justice Rajesh Bindal starts with him taking up LLB. He did LLB from Kurukshetra University. He was born on 16 April 1961 in Ambala, Haryana. After completing his LLB, he worked at the Punjab and Haryana High Court. He became a judge of the Punjab and Haryana High Court in 2006 and then served as a judge of many other High Courts, including the Jammu & Kashmir, Calcutta, and Allahabad High Courts, where he also became the Chief Justice. All these experiences led him to become a Supreme Court judge in 2023 on 13th February. Then he retired on 15th April 2026. Throughout his tenure at the Supreme Court, Justice Bindal documented and authored 166 judgments at an average of 55 per year. His highest records were in criminal matters, almost 46 judgments, followed by service matters with 44 judgments. Property matters have a count of 30 judgements, followed by civil matters with 20 judgements and motor vehicle cases with 17 judgements. This data shows how diverse the profile was with high output.

Justice Bindal’s areas of substantive judicial expertise include constitutional law, taxation law, administrative law, criminal law, and service jurisprudence. He has heard matters spanning constitutional interpretation, fundamental rights doctrine, fiscal disputes at the apex level, administrative challenges to state action, and the procedural and evidentiary standards that govern criminal adjudication. The breadth of subject-matter authority across his judicial career produces an instructional perspective that very few academic faculty can offer, regardless of their scholarly credentials.

Several of Justice Bindal’s judgments hold particular significance for students and practitioners studying contemporary Indian jurisprudence. The Property Owners Association

1. State of Maharashtra (2024), a nine-Judge Constitution Bench decision led by former Chief Justice D. Y. Chandrachud, is the most constitutionally significant matter on his record. The Bench held by an 8:1 majority that not all privately owned properties can be classified as ‘material resources of the community’ under Article 39(b) of the Constitution, disagreeing with Justice Krishna Iyer‘s 1977 interpretation in the State of Karnataka v. Ranganatha Reddy line of cases. The Bench further held that courts must not endorse a particular economic ideology in constitutional interpretation, a structural observation about constitutional adjudication that has ongoing doctrinal implications.

In Shazia Aman Khan v. State of Orissa (2024), the Bench set aside a High Court direction that had ordered a 14-year-old girl to be transferred to her father, from whose custody she had never lived since birth. Justice Bindal held that a child cannot be treated as a chattel and that the stability of the child is of paramount consideration in custody adjudication. The judgment reinforces the child-welfare orientation of Indian custody law against rigid biological-parent presumptions.

In Parminder Singh v. Honey Goyal (2025), Justice Bindal enhanced motor accident compensation from ₹15.25 lakh to ₹36.84 lakh and directed that an alternative to Tribunal-routed claims would be the direct bank transfer of compensation to victims. The direction operates as a systemic reform observation rather than only case-specific relief, recognising the procedural friction that delays compensation reaching motor accident victims and proposing an administrative pathway around it.

In Neeraj Dutta v. State NCT of Delhi (2023), the Bench held that allegations of demand and acceptance of gratification against a public servant must be established beyond reasonable doubt, reinforcing the evidentiary standard in bribery prosecutions. In one of his final rulings in 2026, Justice Bindal held that gratuity is not a bounty but the entitlement of an employee, a labour-rights observation with implications for service jurisprudence across the formal employment sector. Earlier, while serving as Acting Chief Justice of the Jammu and Kashmir High Court in 2020, he directed all courts in Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh to avoid disclosing the identity of rape survivors in proceedings and judgments, an administrative direction that anticipated the broader institutional shift toward survivor-identity protection in Indian criminal procedure.

Read More: Justice Rajesh Bindal architected India’s nationwide Medico-Legal

Apart from his judicial journey, he contributed as an architect of MedLEaPR, the Medico-Legal Examination and Post-Mortem Reporting System. This software helps standardize and secure the forensic, post-mortem reporting, addressing long-standing concerns about evidentiary amalgamation in medico-legal cases. The first launch was in Punjab; the system was made mandatory for all states by the Central Government in 2023 and incorporated with the Crime and Criminal Tracking Network and Systems (CCTNS).

The nationwide rollout is arguably Justice Bindal’s most durable institutional contribution: a structural reform that operates across India’s criminal investigation infrastructure independent of any individual case or judgment.

For law students examining the intersection of judicial vision and administrative reform, MedLEaPR is a concrete case study of how a Judge’s institutional initiative can translate into operational change at national scale.

Justice Bindal’s teaching engagement at Parul University departs from the conventional honorary professorship model in important ways. Rather than delivering scheduled syllabus-aligned lectures, he has expressed a clear preference for an experience-anchored pedagogy: teaching through judgments he has authored, courtroom situations he has presided over, and deliberative considerations that shape how apex court reasoning actually develops. The model treats his accumulated judicial experience as living curriculum rather than ceremonial credential.

Three substantive areas anchor his planned engagement. The first is constitutional law and fundamental rights doctrine, where his perspective from the 9-Judge Property Owners Association Bench, alongside his broader constitutional case record, provides instructional depth that traditional academic faculty cannot match. The second is taxation, administrative, and service jurisprudence, where his volume of authorship across these domains during his Supreme Court tenure equips him to illustrate how doctrinal principles actually operate under apex court scrutiny. The third is contemporary legal challenges including the implementation of the Mediation Act 2023 and the evolving alternative dispute resolution framework, areas where current legal practice is still settling and where forward-looking jurisprudential perspective carries particular value.

Justice Bindal has also signalled significant emphasis on professional ethics and courtroom conduct, an area where Indian legal education has historically left a structural gap. The norms governing a lawyer’s bearing before the Bench, the unwritten expectations of restraint and decorum that animate the adversarial system, and the cultural dimensions of professional conduct in legal practice are difficult to transmit through textbook instruction. They require the perspective of someone who has observed lawyers from the Bench across thousands of proceedings. His engagement is also expected to extend into career guidance, particularly on the wider spectrum of legal career options beyond conventional litigation and corporate practice, including judicial service, government legal positions, regulatory body roles, and the legal advisory components of various central and state government departments and statutory authorities regulated by the Bar Council of India framework.

Justice Bindal’s engagement at Parul University extends beyond classroom teaching into research guidance and institutional development. He has expressed willingness to guide students on research papers and publishable legal scholarship, an opportunity that has particular value for students considering academic careers or scholarly directions within their professional practice. Research mentored by a former Supreme Court Judge carries weight in journal review processes and supports placement in reputable legal scholarship platforms.

His international academic relationships, developed across visits and guest lectures at law schools abroad, position the Parul Institute of Law to pursue formal research collaborations with international legal academic institutions. Such collaborations remain underdeveloped in most Indian private law schools and represent a meaningful area for the Parul Institute of Law to advance its scholarly footprint. Justice Bindal has also indicated willingness to contribute to the Board of Studies, the body responsible for curriculum review and approval; to advise on Memoranda of Understanding (MOUs) with national and international academic partners; and to provide input on infrastructure development for the law programme. The comprehensive scope of engagement, from teaching to research to curriculum to partnerships to institutional advisory, distinguishes the appointment from a conventional honorary title.

The outreach for the appointment was led by the Training and Placement Cell leadership at the Parul Institute of Law, with sustained engagement over several months before the formal appointment was finalised. The Parul University leadership has also approved up to four additional Distinguished Honorary Professorships of Law to be filled by former Supreme Court Judges, former Chief Justices of India, and former Chief Justices of various State High Courts. The combined ambition represents the most concentrated effort by a private law institution in India to bring direct judicial perspective into academic instruction at scale.

Read More: Law graduate at ICICI Lombard from Parul Institute of Law.

Justice Bindal’s appointment sits within a broader institutional proposition at the Parul Institute of Law that combines academic depth with structured professional preparation. Parul University offers a five-year program, BA LLB (Hons.) and BBA LLB (Hons.), with a three-year LLB program and a postgraduate program that is LLM. The university has an internship integrated into the program that guarantees two internship placements per academic year for each student, one covered during the summer break and the other during winter.

The internships network is spread over law firms, advocates, courts, and legal advisory bodies. They support almost 1,100 students simultaneously in internship placements, with mandatory one-on-one counseling sessions with senior faculty, a review of each internship, and guidance for the next. There is a moot court and clinical training cell at the institute that organizes moot court programming into a broader suite of clinical legal skills, including trial advocacy, client counseling, mediation, and arbitration.

The 2026 batch received placement where 80 to 90 percent of students seeking employment got placed, with the highest package being ₹8 lakh per annum, a competitive outcome for entry-level legal practice at private law schools. The placement cell focuses on each student and helps them get placed by giving them training.

Read More: From BA LLB student to law clerk at Supreme Court.