Chennai: Justice S Vimala of the Madras high court was on Monday formally nominated as the tie-breaker judge in the case to decide the fate of 18 AIADMK MLAs disqualified by assembly speaker on September 18, 2017.An oral communication on her nomination reached her late on Monday evening from the office of justice Huluvadi G Ramesh — the second senior-most judge of the HC.On June 14, the first bench of chief justice Indira Banerjee and justice M Sundar failed to reach a consensus and delivered a split verdict in the case. The chief justice took a moral high ground and said that since she herself was part of the bench, it would not be proper for her to name a third judge whose ruling would be final. She then referred the matter to the next senior-most judge for nominating the third judge. Justice Vimala is 15th in seniority among the 63 judges of the Madras high court. Born in January 1957, she was appointed as additional judge of the high court on December 20, 2011 and became permanent judge on October 21, 2013. Justice Vimala is jurist with a heart, as she is known to pen expressive verdicts backed by meaty legal propositions, keeping the interests of under-privileged litigants alone at the centre. Her judgments on applying welfare legislations to the full benefit of people injured in road accidents or kin of road accident victims have been widely reported in top law journals.Justice Vimala has also written a book Whether winning a case means success in life? which was published by Tamil Nadu State Commission for Women.Ever since the first bench came out with a split verdict, there were debates within the legal fraternity whether Justice Ramesh would himself be the third judge or would he nominate a third judge, as both options were well within his limits. Now, cutting the suspense short, immediately after the high court reopened after a three-day holiday, justice Ramesh has nominated justice Vimala to be the tie-breaker judge.In her days as district judge in the state, Justice Vimala had the distinction of being the first Mahila Court judge in Chennai, in 2002 and in 2006 she became first-ever woman to be appointed director of a state judicial academy in India.

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