Article 124(3) Names Three Ways to Become a Supreme Court Judge. The Collegium Has Only Ever Used Two.

The Constitution Left a Door Open. The Collegium Never Walked Through It. Article

124(3) does not say the Supreme Court must be staffed only by High Court judges and senior advocates. It names three routes, in the same sentence, with the same constitutional weight: five years on a High Court bench, ten years at the Bar or - in the President's opinion - being a "distinguished jurist." Seventy-five years on, only the first two have ever produced a single judge.

The third sits in the text, fully valid, entirely unused.

The Text Was Never the Obstacle

• the Institution Was This is not a case of constitutional silence, the kind of genuine gap Priya usually looks for. The framers were explicit: H.V. Kamath argued in the Constituent Assembly on May 24, 1949 that India needed a way to bring in scholars with "outstanding legal and juristic learning" even without courtroom experience, pointing to how judges of the International Court of Justice were selected. Ambedkar's only objection was to the word "distinguished" itself - he wondered if "eminent" fit better - and left the final call to the Drafting Committee. The clause passed cleanly. There was no ambiguity to resolve later, no vague phrase courts had to interpret. The provision has always meant exactly what it says. What actually blocked it is structural, not textual: since the Second Judges Case established the Collegium system, every Supreme Court appointment must first be recommended by the Collegium before the government acts on it. A Collegium composed entirely of sitting judges, evaluating candidates against their own professional template - High Court experience, courtroom track record - has no institutional incentive to recommend someone whose qualification is academic depth rather than judicial or advocacy experience. Justice Bhuyan's own diagnosis captures this precisely: either the Collegium believed Indian academia lacked sufficient depth or - more damningly - it simply never seriously explored the option at all.

Why the Distinction Matters for the Exam The

42nd Amendment briefly extended a similar "distinguished jurist" category to High Court appointments under Article 217, only for the 44th Amendment to repeal it post-Emergency - a rare instance of the Constitution actually testing a version of this idea and then reversing course, distinct from the Supreme Court provision, which has simply never been tried at all.

That distinction matters: Article 217's version was tried and abandoned; Article 124(3)(c) has never been tried and abandoned, it has simply been ignored. An aspirant who conflates "the Constitution once allowed this and stopped" with "the Constitution has always allowed this and nobody has used it" will misread the actual institutional failure at the heart of this story - which is not textual withdrawal, but sustained non-use by design.