"The time has come for the judiciary and the government to share power of judicial appointments along with the Leader of the Opposition in Parliament, the academic world and the Bar," he told a national conference on "Legal education at cross roads - problems and perspectives".

"Involving these five interests can bring about a happy balance and remove ills bedevilling the process of selection of judges which is inevitably showing up today," the Union Urban Development Minister said. He regretted that judges at the highest level were involved in the lesser pursuit of propping up unworthy appointments to the bench. "Even the judiciary needs to be told that something has gone wrong somewhere in the experiment embarked upon two years ago by which the judicial power of appointments was vested with the highest judiciary," he toldthe conference organised by the Bar Council of India.

Expressing his "disappointment" with the system's working, Jethmalani said he was "profoundly sorry" that this scheme by which the judiciary had been given primacy vis-a-vis the government in appointments was "not at all working well". "This is resulting in a new opinion speedily gaining ground that the power for making judicial appointments should be lodged with a National Judicial Commission where the judiciary and the executive are jointly involved with neither having an exclusive say," the minister told the gathering of Apex Court judges and senior Bar members.

Referring to the state of legal education in the country, Jethmalani said it was unfortunate that whatever defects or frailties had been pointed out by him 40 years ago, when he was in the Bar Council, still exist. "This is a sad reflection of the decline of standards in every department of our lives," he said. Jethmalani said there appeared to be a terrible dearth of law teachers in thecountry and it was time senior lawyers took to teaching law. "In our profession we seem to have teachers who have not seen a single brief. The need of the hour is to have more practicing lawyers instead of petty-fogging types to teach the younger generation," he said.