Jawwad S. Khawaja is a justice of the Supreme Court of Pakistan.[1]
He was born in Wazirabad in 1950, and was educated at the Mission School in Wazirabad, Lawrence College in Murree, Aitchison College in Lahore and FC College in Lahore. He did his LL.B. from the Punjab University Law College and his LL.M. from the University of California, Berkeley. He started his legal practice as an advocate of the Lahore High Court in 1975 and was a partner at the Cornelius, Lane and Mufti – one of the best law firms in Pakistan.[2] In 1999, he became a judge of the Lahore High Court but resigned in 2007 in response to the maltreatment of Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry on March 9.[3] He joined the Law and Policy Department of the Lahore University of Management Sciences in August 2007 and served as the head of department from October 2007 to May 2009, when he joined the Supreme Court of Pakistan.[4]
Some of the important Supreme Court decisions Justice Khawaja has been part of include: the SHCBA case, in which the Court declared the Emergency imposed by President General Pervez Musharraf on 3 November 2007 to be unconstitutional and restored most of the judges who were forced to vacate office that day;[5] the NRO case, in which the Supreme Court declared the National Reconciliation Ordinance 2007 to be void ab initio (Justice Khawaja wrote a concurrent opinion);[6] and the Makro-Habib case, in which the Court ordered the wholesale giant Makro-Habib (and its patron Army Welfare Trust) to restore the playground in Sadr Karachi on which it had established its outlet (Justice Khawaja wrote the leading opinion).[7]