Mondays and Fridays

Last winter while interning with a Supreme Court Lawyer, I used to regularly follow Court proceedings on a daily basis and I was amazed at the Special Leave Petition (SLP) days -Mondays and Fridays. I was amazed on two counts: firstly at the manner in which almost every matter would be given a minute or two before being thrown out; and secondly, and more importantly, the sheer number of cases the Court heard.

The Supreme Court of India hears close to 60,000 cases in a year, most of which have done rounds of numerous fora at lower levels and appealed right through to the apex court. In contrast, most other apex judicial bodies around the world hear only a small fraction of this number. Also, most of these cases that our Supreme Court hears are SLPs and there are very few constitutional matters with of 5, 7, 9, 11 judge benches.

There are two questions that arise in my mind in this regard. Firstly, what causes so many appeals to the Supreme Court in this country? And secondly, why have Monday and Friday hearings at all? Could judges not decide whether or not to entertain an SLP by simply looking at the papers, given that counsel are barely heard?

The answer to the first question, it seems to me, is rather obvious – litigants are simply dissatisfied by lower court judgments. I guess these could be the reasons:

1. Corruption amongst judges of lower courts;

2. Intellectual capacity of Judges of lower courts;

3. Judges may tend to decide a case in a manner that minimises the risk of it being overruled on appeal, at the expense of justice (so, for example, in a case with 9 contentions where 4 favour the plaintiff and 5 favour the defendant the judge might decide all 9 points in favour of the defendant, lest the judgment should run a greater risk of being overturned on appeal);

4. Judges on a division bench almost never differ.

As yet I cannot find much reason for the second question, but looking at the disparity in the number of lawyers present in court on SLP days and those on final hearing days, I would think SLP days exist to provide for lawyers that might otherwise be unemployed!