Sam Piroj Bharucha was the Chief Justice

Chief Justice

The Chief Justice in many countries is the name for the presiding member of a Supreme Court in Commonwealth or other countries with an Anglo-Saxon justice system based on English common law, such as the Supreme Court of Canada, the Constitutional Court of South Africa, the Court of Final Appeal of...

 of the Supreme Court of India

Supreme Court of India

The Supreme Court of India is the highest judicial forum and final court of appeal as established by Part V, Chapter IV of the Constitution of India...

 from November 2001 until his retirement in 2002.

He began his legal career as an advocate

Advocate

An advocate is a term for a professional lawyer used in several different legal systems. These include Scotland, South Africa, India, Scandinavian jurisdictions, Israel, and the British Crown dependencies of Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man...

 of the Bombay High Court

Bombay High Court

Bombay High Court at Mumbai, Maharashtra, is the High Court of India with jurisdiction over the states of Maharashtra & Goa, and, the Union Territories of Daman and Diu and Dadra and Nagar Haveli...

 in 1960, and was appointed an Additional Judge in 1977. His judgeship was made permanent in 1978, and in 1991 he was appointed as Chief Justice of the Karnataka High Court

Karnataka High Court

The Karnataka High Court is the High Court of the Indian state of Karnataka. It is located in Bangalore, the capital city of Karnataka. The High Court functions out of a red brick building known as Attara Kacheri...

. In 1992, he was appointed to the Supreme Court of India, and became Chief Justice in 2001.

Bharucha is responsible for many significant legal decisions. He was part of the five judge constitutional panel which unanimously ruled on the 2001 dismissal of J. Jayalalithaa

J. Jayalalithaa

Jayalalithaa Jayaram ; born 24 February 1948) commonly referred to as J. Jayalalitha, is the Chief Minister of the state of Tamil Nadu, India. She is the incumbent general secretary of All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam , a Dravidian party. She is called Amma and Puratchi Thalaivi by her...

 as Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu is one of the 28 states of India. Its capital and largest city is Chennai. Tamil Nadu lies in the southernmost part of the Indian Peninsula and is bordered by the union territory of Pondicherry, and the states of Kerala, Karnataka, and Andhra Pradesh...

. It was the first and only such dismissal of a chief minister in India's history.