Konakuppakatil Gopinathan Balakrishnan, born in 1945, served as the thirty seventh Chief Justice of India from 2007 to 2010 and was the first judge from Kerala and the first Dalit to hold the office, a distinction he held until the elevation of B. R. Gavai in 2025. Admitted to the Kerala Bar in 1968, he served on the Kerala, Gujarat and Madras High Courts before joining the Supreme Court in 2000. Over his Supreme Court career he authored two hundred nineteen judgments across seven hundred eighty seven benches, and his three year tenure as Chief Justice was among the longest in the history of the court. He went on to chair the National Human Rights Commission of India until 2015.
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K. G. Balakrishnan (Wikipedia)
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Konakuppakatil Gopinathan Balakrishnan is an Indian judge who served as the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of India from 2007 to 2010, and later as chairperson of the National Human Rights Commission of India. He was the first judge from Kerala and the first Dalit to become the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. He remained the only Dalit to have held the position until the elevation of Bhushan Ramkrishna Gavai as Chief Justice in 2025. His tenure lasting more than three years has been one of the longest in the Supreme Court. While being Chief Justice of Gujarat High Court, he was appointed the acting governor of Gujarat from 16 January 1999 to 18 March 1999. In 2010, he was conferred with an honorary doctorate by Cochin University of Science and Technology.
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