Applicants for Senior Counsel status being sought

The Office of the Chancellor of the Judiciary is inviting attorneys-at-law desirous of being elevated to Senior Counsel to apply.

A notice to this effect appeared in yesterday’s Stabroek News. The invitation will be viewed with great interest as the conferring of `silk’, as the status is usually referred, has been the source of controversy and speculation for decades particularly over the manner in which the selections are made and their timing. It is unclear for instance why there has been such a long interval in the consideration of new candidates. It was also pointed last week in a letter to this newspaper that there are no female senior counsel.

The last conferrals would have been in 1996 when former Speaker of the