JUDGMENT

T.S. Thakur, J.

1. Leave granted.

2. Recruitment to public services often gets embroiled in legal complications and resultant litigation consequently delaying the process of filling up of the vacancies, a feature hardly conducive to public interest. What is disturbing is that recruitment process for appointment to the District Judiciary in the States is also not immune to this phenomenon no matter recruitments are made in consultation with the High Court on the administrative side and at times monitored by them. The present appeal that arises out of an order passed by the High Court of Kerala is one such case where the recruitment process for the post of District and Sessions Judges in the Kerala State Higher Judicial Service was the subject-matter of multiple rounds of litigation. The genesis of the present lis lies in a notification issued by the High Court of Kerala for appointment to the six vacancies in the cadre of District and Sessions Judges by direct recruitment from the Bar. Notification dated 16th April, 2007 inviting applications against those vacancies was followed by a written examination conducted in October 2007 in which as against 960 candidates who applie