Who Is V. Mohana? The Senior Advocate Who May Join the Supreme Court Bench
EduLaw EditorialNewsEduLaw · Know Your Advocates · Part 1 WHO IS V. MOHANA? The Senior Advocate Who May Shape India’s Next Decade from the Supreme Court Bench Career • Judgments • Philosophy • Impact Published 27 May 2026 · ~6,500 words · 25 min read Section 1 The Oath That Has Not Yet Been Taken Imagine the Central Hall of the Supreme Court of India on a morning that has not yet arrived. The oak-panelled chamber hushes. A woman walks to the lectern, right hand raised, and reads the constitutional oath that will transform her from an officer of the court into a member of the court itself. She is V. Mohana—first-generation lawyer, daughter of a mother who believed that law could liberate, graduate of a college that had no women’s hostel when she enrolled, and, if the Collegium’s recommendation is accepted, only the second woman in the Supreme Court’s seventy-six-year history to be elevated directly from the Bar. On 27 May 2026 the Supreme Court Collegium, led by Chief Justice B. R. Gavai, recommended five names for elevation: four sitting High Court Chief Justices—Justice Sheel Nagu (Punjab & Haryana), Justice Shree Chandrashekhar (Bombay), Justice Sanjeev Sachdeva (Madhya Pradesh), and Justice Arun Palli (Jammu & Kashmir and Ladakh)—and one Senior Advocate: V. Mohana. The recommendations were made across two sittings, on 22 May and 27 May. If the Government of India clears the file, the Court’s working strength will rise toward the newly sanctioned ceiling of thirty-eight judges, up from the previous thirty-four, filling vacancies left by the June retirements of Justices J. K. Maheshwari and Pankaj Mithal. This article is not a biography. It is a story about a person, a philosophy, and a future impact—told through the lens of EduLaw, which believes that understanding who sits on the bench is as important as understanding the law they will interpret. Mohana’s elevation, if confirmed, will be the tenth instance of a practising advocate being appointed directly to the Supreme Court, and only the second time that advocate has been a woman. The first was Justice Indu Malhotra in 2018. That Malhotra was also Mohana’s mentor is not coincidence; it is the quiet architecture of Indian legal history revealing its patterns. “My mother told me: ‘Study law. It will give you a voice when the world tries to silence you.’ There were no lawyers in my family. There was no women’s hostel in my college. But there was my mother’s conviction, and that was enough.” — V. Mohana, in an interview with Legal Bites Section 2 From Coimbatore to Courtroom 1: A Personal Background V. Mohana was born into a family with no connection to the legal profession. Her mother, the decisive influence in her life, urged her toward law at a time when the profession was overwhelmingly male and metropolitan. In 1983, India introduced the five-year integrated B.A. LL.B. programme for the first time, and Mohana was part of its inaugural cohort at Government Law College, Coimbatore (then known as Coimbatore Law College). The infrastructure was sparse. There was no women’s hostel. Library hours were limited. But the faculty, many of them practising lawyers who visited the college between court sittings, brought the courtroom into the classroom, and that proximity to practice shaped Mohana’s understanding of law as something lived, not merely studied. She graduated in 1988 with a B.A. LL.B. and enrolled with the Bar Council. Her early years were spent in Coimbatore under the tutelage of M. Panchapakesan, a senior advocate who impressed upon her the importance of mastering procedural law before attempting to argue substance. This apprenticeship—grinding through case files, attending trial courts, drafting applications—gave her a foundation that many law graduates, trained in moot-court abstractions, never acquire. Mohana has spoken repeatedly about the gap between legal education and legal practice, arguing that Indian law schools produce graduates who can pass examinations but cannot draft a coherent application or cross-examine a witness. Her own education, imperfect as it was, at least had the advantage of proximity to working lawyers. The decision to move to Delhi was the second turning point. In the early 1990s, Mohana relocated to the capital and began working with Indu Malhotra, then a rising advocate at the Supreme Court who would later become the first woman elevated directly from the Bar to the bench. Malhotra’s chambers became Mohana’s graduate school. Through Malhotra, she gained exposure to constitutional, commercial, and arbitration law at the highest level, and she learned the unwritten craft of Supreme Court advocacy: how to read a bench, when to press an argument, and when to sit down. Over the years, Mohana also worked with or appeared alongside some of the most