Sigh! The Supreme Court has opened the doors to bringing back the Indian Legal Service (ILS) as judicial members on tribunals - https://www.livelaw.in/top-stories/exclusion-of-advocates-for-consideration-as-judicial-members-in-tribunals-contrary-to-sc-judgments-supreme-court-166512

This is happening 10 years after the Supreme Court in R. Gandhi v. Union of India barred them from holding the post of judicial members - to be fair, the court's reasoning was on shaky grounds but it was a 5 judge bench order - how can a bench of 3 judges https://indiankanoon.org/doc/748977/ 

set it aside? In my opinion allowing ILS officers is a bad idea - these are the guys who drafted the legislation in the nineties creating tribunals and giving themselves rosy posts on such tribunals. They have very little experiene actually practising the law. More importantly,

they constitute a powerful force with the bureaucracy - their approach and line of thinking is fundamentally different from a member of the bar. Lawyers have many shortcomings but given their business - which is to fight the government in court, they tend to be more suspicious of

govt. and that makes them much better judges. Wait and watch how the ILS cadre captures all tribunals over the next decade.