Court on Trial by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789357081795
Publisher: Penguin Random House India Private Limited
Published: 2023-07-23T22:00:00+00:00

An Unaccountable Power

The judges who gave the press conference were concerned that there had been certain instances of strategic assignment by Chief Justice Dipak Misra ‘without any rational basis for such assignment’. 40 This chapter demonstrates that the Master of the Roster controversy is not merely about, and should not be reduced to, individual instances. The Master of the Roster power presents a systemic problem for the judiciary in at least two ways. First, in principle, the power is untrammelled, and there is no clarity on the principles by which it is exercised. For this reason, there is little accountability for the exercise of the power, which leaves open the possibility of misuse in individual cases, and for strategic deployment to suit outcomes preferred by the Chief Justice more generally. Second, in practice, the rostering power is deployed in a strategic manner, across the board, and not only in discrete instances. So, when the Chief Justice over-assigns Constitution Bench cases to himself, this contradicts the claim that the Chief Justice has no more power than other judges on the judicial side. The Chief Justice wields the Master of the Roster power to give himself a greater say than other judges in shaping judicial discourse and in deciding the most important issues of the day. By constituting benches in a manner that the Chief Justice is never on the losing side of a split decision in a Constitution Bench, the Chief Justice is able to ensure his preferred outcomes, which is a power that no other judge has on the judicial side. Gadbois’ work indicates that the Chief Justice has an influence on judicial outcomes—across the board—even on benches that the Chief Justice is not part of. It is a fallacy then to say that the Chief Justice is only primus inter pares. The Master of the Roster power has given the office of the Chief Justice primacy even in judicial decision-making.

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