Altamas Kabir (19 July 1948 – 19 February 2017) was an Indian lawyer and judge who served as the 39th Chief Justice of India. Early life and education Altamas Kabir was born in Calcutta in 1948 to a Bengali Muslim family from the district of Faridpur (now in Bangladesh). He studied at the Mount Hermon School, Darjeeling, and the Calcutta Boys' School. Impressed by one of his argumentative articles on social issues and their solutions, a teacher at Calcutta Boys' School advised him to pursue a career in law. After graduating with history from Presidency College, then affiliated with the University of Calcutta, he studied law at the University of Calcutta, Kolkata. His father, Jehangir Kabir, was a leading Congress politician and trade union leader from West Bengal who served as the Minister in the B. C. Roy and P. C. Sen ministries and also went on to become a minister in the first non-Congress government in West Bengal in 1967, with Ajoy Kumar Mukherjee as the Chief Minister of West Bengal. His uncle, Humayun Kabir, was a Bengali writer and a minister in the Union Cabinets of Jawaharlal Nehru and Lal Bahadur Shashtri. Career After completing his M.A. and LL.B. from the University of Calcutta, Kabir was admitted to the bar in 1973 and practiced civil and criminal law in Kolkata at the district court and the Calcutta High Court, Kolkata. He was made a permanent judge of the Calcutta High Court on 6 August 1990. Kabir was appointed to the office of acting Chief Justice of Calcutta High Court on 11 January 2005. Kabir is credited with the computerization of the Calcutta High Court, the City Civil Court, and other Courts in Kolkata. He became the acting chief justice of the Jharkhand High Court on 3 January 2005, an elevation made permanent on 1 March 2005. He was elevated to the Supreme Court of India as Justice on 9 September 2005. On 29 September 2012, he became the 39th Chief Justice of India. After a tenure of a little over nine months as CJI, he retired on 18 July 2013. During his tenure as chief justice, he was the Chancellor of the West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences, the Chairman of the General Council of the Gujarat National Law University, and the Visitor of the National Law School of India University. He also taught as a professor