Justice Jawwad Khawaja takes oath as Chief Justice of Pakistan — holds LLM from Berkeley

Chief Justice Nasirul Mulk was retired after remaining the Chief Justice of Pakistan for 13 months.

President Mamnoon Hussain administered oath to Justice Khawaja as the new chief justice in an oath taking ceremony at the Presidency on Monday morning.

Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, federal ministers, members of parliament, services chiefs, senior lawyers and Supreme Court judges attended the oath taking ceremony.

 

Justice Khawaja will serve as chief justice of the Supreme Court for only 23 days as he is also due to retire on Sept 9. His tenure will be the shortest as chief justice of Supreme Court after Justice Mohammad Shahabuddin, who held the top judicial office of Pakistan for 10 days, from 3rd May 1960 to 12 May of the same year.

Justice Anwar Zaheer Jamali will be the senior most judge of the Supreme Court after retirement of Justice Khawaja.

Justice Khawaja was appointed as the Judge of Supreme Court in 2009.

He was the first judge to resign in protest from the high court in March 2007 after former President Pervez Musharraf virtually suspended the then chief justice of Pakistan, Chaudhry Iftikhar, and appointed the senior-most judge, Justice Javed Iqbal, as the acting Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

 

Profile of the new Chief Justice

According to the Chief Justice’s profile from the website of the Supreme Court, he was born on September 10, 1950 in Wazirabad in Gujranwala district. He studied at FC College in Lahore where he did his graduation in 1971 in the Arts.

After that he went to the Punjab University Law College where he obtained an LL.b in 1973. Justice Khawaja then obtained a Master’s (LL.M) degree from the University of California, Berkeley in 1975.

“Thereafter he was enrolled as Advocate of the High Court in 1975 and as Advocate of the Supreme Court in 1985. He remained in legal practice until his appointment as a Judge of the Lahore High Court on 21^stApril, 1999. He resigned his constitutional tenure on 19^th March 2007,” when he refused to take oath on General Musharraf’s provisional constitutional order.

Following that he was Professor of Law at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) and headed the Department of Law and Policy there until his appointment as Judge of the Supreme Court of Pakistan on June 5, 2009.