Important Legal Definitions

The legal standard applied by Indian courts to evaluate bias allegations, asking not whether the judge was actually biased, but whether a reasonable person, looking at all the circumstances, would entertain a reasonable apprehension of bias.

In Ranjit Thakur v. Union of India, an army officer who had previously filed a grievance against his commanding officer was subsequently court-martialed by that exact same commanding officer; the Supreme Court quashed the sentence, finding a real likelihood of bias.