We’ve got a new Chief Justice of India, Justice Tirath Singh Thakur, who has been part of some crucial judgments in his tenure in the Supreme Court. Currently, he is part of judicial Benches looking into the multi-crore rupee Saradha chit fund scam, National Rural Health Scam, Ganga cleaning and so on.

We bring you a list of five of the recent judgments of which Justice Thakur was part:

In March 2015, Narayanaswami Srinivasan was replaced as President of the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) by Jagmohan Dalmiya. This was after the Supreme Court judgment in January that banned Srinivasan from contesting the BCCI elections. As a Supreme Court judge, TS Thakur headed the Bench that delivered the verdict to reform cricket controlling body BCCI in the wake of allegations of sporting frauds like match-fixing and betting in the Indian Premier League. The Justice Lodha Committee, which issued a series of recommendations relating to IPL and BCCI, had also been set up by this Bench. The verdict resulted in the ouster of two top teams, Chennai Super Kings and Rajasthan Royals, besides Srinivasan.

In September, after the beef ban was imposed in Maharashtra, organisations representing the Jain community submitted a plea to set aside the Bombay High Court stay on a state government notification banning the sale of meat and slaughter in Mumbai during the Jain Paryushan period of penance. Saying that meat bans cannot be “shoved down someone’s throat”, the Supreme Court Bench comprising Justices Thakur and Kurian Joseph refusedthe plea saying “compassion is not something that should be reserved only for festival periods”. Justice Thakur also observed that, “Meat bans are not the way to inculcate ahimsa. Ahimsa cannot be forced. It has to be appealed to in a different manner at another level.”

A Supreme Court Bench headed by Justices Thakur and A K Goel in February this year ruled that a Muslim’s fundamental right to profess Islam did not include practicing polygamy. It held that polygamy was not an integral part of any religion and that the state could regulate such practices. “What was protected under Article 25 (right to practice and propagate any religion) was the religious faith and not a practice which may run counter to public order, health or morality. Polygamy was not integral part of religion and monogamy was a reform within the power of the State under Article 25.”

A judgment by Justice Thakur in 2014 ruled to create stringent scrutiny on persons interested in joining the police. The ruling said, “a candidate to be recruited to the police service must be worthy of confidence and must be a person of utmost rectitude and must have impeccable character and integrity. A person having criminal antecedents will not fit in this category”. This implies that if a person has faced a criminal case, he/she cannot be admitted into the police force, even if the person has been acquitted or has reached a settlement under the law.

As a judicial intervention to tackle the drug menace in the country, it was on the orders of a Bench headed by Justice Thakur in 2012, that a massive and first-ever official exercise to trace the data of narcotics seized in the last 10 years was initiated. The Supreme Court also asked chief secretaries to gather statistics from police chiefs and it was learnt that of the 51.4 lakh kg of narcotics confiscated across the country over the last 10 years, only 16 lakh kg was destroyed.

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Justice Thakur was sworn in as the 43rd Chief Justice of India by President Pranab Mukherjee on Thursday in an elaborate ceremony at the Rashtrapati Bhavan. Taking over from Justice HL Dattu, who retired on Wednesday, 63-year-old Justice Thakur is the senior-most judge of the Supreme Court. He will retire on January 4, 2017, and serve as the Chief Justice of India for over a year.

Son of former Deputy Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir Devi Das Thakur — who was also a well-known judge of the Jammu and Kashmir High Court — Justice Thakur enrolled as a pleader in October 1972 and joined his father’s Chamber. In 1990, he was designated as a senior advocate. Justice Thakur was appointed as an additional judge of the Jammu and Kashmir High Court in 1994 and was subsequently transferred to become a Karnataka High Court judge in March, the same year.

Appointed as an acting Chief Justice of the Delhi High Court in April 2008, he took over as Chief Justice of the Punjab and Haryana High Court in the same year in August. He’s been a judge in the Supreme Court since 2009.