The Profession under the Indian High Courts Act 1861

In one line

When one court replaced two in 1861, one bar replaced two: the same High Court could now enrol advocates, vakeels and attorneys, and for the first time an Indian practitioner could be enrolled in a court that had descended from the Supreme Court.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: section 9 of the Indian High Courts Act 1861 gave each High Court such jurisdiction, powers and authority as Her Majesty might grant by letters patent, together with the whole jurisdiction of the courts abolished under the Act; clause 9 of the Letters Patent of 1865 accordingly authorised and empowered the High Court to approve, admit and enrol such and so many advocates, vakeels and attorneys as it should think fit, who might appear for the suitors of the Court and plead, or act, or plead and act, according as the Court might by its rules and directions determine; and section 19 of the Act defined "barrister", for the purposes of the Act, as including barristers of England or Ireland and members of the Faculty of Advocates in Scotland.

Why 1861 is the turning point for the profession

Two systems of courts had produced two professions. The King's courts admitted advocates and attorneys, and those words let in only British barristers, Scottish advocates and British attorneys. The Company's courts enrolled vakils and pleaders, and after 1833 and 1846 those were open to any qualified person of any nationality or religion. Nobody could cross from the second into the first.

The Indian High Courts Act 1861 abolished both sets of courts and put one court in their place. On the establishment of the High Courts all the courts throughout British India became, for the first time and in the full sense of the word, Crown courts, and were brought for the first time under one unified system of control. The High Court was the successor of the Supreme Court and of the Sudder courts together, and it took the jurisdictions of both: the Supreme Court's civil, criminal, admiralty and vice-admiralty, testamentary, intestate and matrimonial jurisdictions, original and appellate, exercised on its original side, and the appellate jurisdiction of the Sudder Dewanny Adawlat and the Sudder Nizamat Adawlat, exercised on its appellate side.

A single court cannot have two mutually exclusive bars. What it had instead, from 1865, was one roll with three descriptions on it.

Section 9 of the Act, and clause 9 of the letters patent

Section 9 of the Act itself says nothing about practitioners. It provides that each High Court shall have and exercise all such civil, criminal, admiralty and vice-admiralty, testamentary, intestate and matrimonial jurisdiction, original and appellate, and all such powers and authority for and in relation to the administration of justice in the Presidency for which it is established, as Her Majesty may by letters patent grant and direct, subject to any directions and limitations in those letters patent about original jurisdiction beyond the Presidency Towns; and, save as the letters patent otherwise direct, the High Court is to have every power and authority whatsoever vested in any of the courts abolished under the Act.