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Gopal Ballav Pattanaik

32nd Chief Justice of India

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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 26, 2026
Entity authorityQ3688096 ↗
Source-derived summary

Gopal Ballav Pattanaik (born 19 December 1937) is an Indian lawyer and later a jurist who served for 19 years on the bench of the Odisha High Court as a permanent judge, as chief justice of Patna High Court, judge of the Supreme Court of India and as the 32nd Chief Justice of India.

Pattanaik grew up in Cuttack, Odisha, where he later studied at the Ravenshaw College and then graduated in science from Ewing Christian College, Allahabad University. He then went on to earn his degree in Law from Madhusudan Law College at Cuttack affiliated to the Utkal University in Odisha.

In 2002, Pattanaik was appointed Chief Justice of India by the President Shri A. P. J. Abdul Kalam.

Justice Patnaik was a member of the committee that formulated and recommended the Restatement of Values of Judicial Life, a code of judicial ethics for judges of the High Courts and the Supreme Court of India. The recommendations were adopted by the Supreme Court of India in a Full Court meeting on May 7, 1997. This charter was subsequently ratified and adopted by the Indian judiciary during the Chief Justices’ Conference in 1999. It serves as a guiding framework for the ethical conduct and integrity of the higher judiciary in India.

Early life and education

He was born on 19 December 1937 in the city of Cuttack, now in Odisha, India.

He studied at the Ravenshaw College in Cuttack and graduated in Science from the Ewing Christian College, Allahabad University and earned his degree in Law from Madhusudan Law College, Utkal University in Odisha.

Editorial summary

This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Gopal Ballav Pattanaik” as 32nd Chief Justice of India. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.

Editorial reviewA practical starting point whose main value is the path it opens into stronger specialist and primary sources. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1937, 2002, 1997, 1999—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1937-12-19. The account is most persuasive where Gopal, Ballav and Pattanaik can be independently traced.
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Why this record matters

The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as 32nd Chief Justice of India. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.

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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 26, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3688096. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1937, 2002, 1997 and 1999.

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This entry incorporates text from “Gopal Ballav Pattanaik” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.