The Tamil Nadu Dr. Ambedkar Law University has decided to confer honorary doctorates in law on former Chief Justice of India and incumbent Governor of Kerala P. Sathasivam, the senior-most judge of the Supreme Court Justice Sharad Arvind Bobde and the Chief Justice of Madras High Court Vijaya Kamlesh Tahilramani.

President Ram Nath Kovind is slated to award the doctorates to the three eminent jurists at a special convocation scheduled to be held on the university campus here on Saturday.

Governor Banwarilal Purohit, Chief Minister Edappadi K. Palaniswami and Law Minister C.Ve. Shanmugam have agreed to take part in the ceremony.

The doctorates are being conferred in recognition of their stellar contributions to the march of law. Mr. Sathasivam was born into an agricultural family at Kadappanallur village near Bhavani in Erode dsitrict in 1949 and studied at the Government High School in Singampettai before graduating from Government Law College in Chennai in 1973. After serving as an Additional Government Pleader and then a Special Government Pleader in the Madras High Court, he was appointed as a permanent judge of the court at a relatively young age of 46 on January 8, 1996.

In 2007, he was elevated to the Supreme Court and assumed office as the 40th CJI on July 19, 2013 and retired from service in April 2014.

He has to his credit several path-breaking judgments such as the 1993 Mumbai blast case verdict in which his Bench convicted several accused, including film actor Sanjay Dutt, to five years of imprisonment, the Safai Karamchari Andolan judgment aimed at eradicating manual scavenging and a host of decisions on electoral reforms.

Justice Bobde was born in April 1956 at Nagpur and got enrolled in the Bar Council over there in 1978. He practised as a lawyer for over two decades and got designated as a Senior Counsel in 1998. He was appointed as a judge of the Bombay High Court in March 2000 and then as Chief Justice of Madhya Pradesh High Court in October 2012.

He was elevated to the Supreme Court in April 2013 and was now the senior-most judge of the court.

Chief Justice Tahilramani also hails from Maharashtra. Born in 1958, she got enrolled as a lawyer in 1982 and practised primarily in criminal law. She was appointed as a Bombay High Court judge in 2001.

She served as the Acting Chief Justice of Bombay High Court for three different tenures between September 2015 and August 2018 and was appointed as the Madras High Court Chief Justice of on August 12 last year.