Justice Lalit changed case listing approach as CJI, says Justice Kaul in memoir

The Supreme Court had more than 1,000 cases marked as “sensitive” that were kept off its regular cause lists, a practice that exposed how the Chief Justice of India’s control over case allocation and listing could determine which matters came up for hearing, former top court judge Sanjay Kishan Kaul has written in his memoir “Without Fear or Favour”, crediting Justice Uday U Lalit with changing that approach during his brief tenure as the CJI.

Justice Kaul’s account of Justice Lalit’s tenure, which lasted less than three months in 2022, offers an insight into how administrative decisions at the top of the judiciary can shape access to justice. Justice Lalit, Kaul writes, began assigning cases that had previously been marked “sensitive” and left unlisted during Justice NV Ramana’s tenure as the CJI, bringing them back into the judicial process.

The episode also highlights the extraordinary influence the CJI wields over the Supreme Court’s functioning, not only through the constitution of benches and allocation of cases, but also through decisions on what gets listed for hearing.

“This discretionary and almost arbitrary power had grown to unreasonable proportions by the time Justice Lalit took over. Over 1,000 cases lay unlisted. It was impossible to tell why on earth some of those matters had been marked as sensitive when they were positively mundane. It was Chief Justice Lalit who began to assign some of these matters,” writes Justice Kaul.

To be sure, the CJI, as “master of the roster”, has the administrative authority to allocate cases to benches and determine their listing in the top court, giving the office considerable influence over which matters come up for hearing and when.

Justice Lalit’s approach was part of a wider effort to address a long-standing backlog of important cases, the memoir highlights. On his first day as CJI, he convened a full-court meeting and moved to constitute six Constitution benches of five judges each to hear 30 pending matters. Justice Kaul noted that no Constitution bench had been constituted during the tenure of Justice Lalit’s predecessor, Justice Ramana.

The scale of the exercise was significant: several of the matters taken up by the Constitution benches were disposed of within six to eight months. For Justice Kaul, this demonstrated that the backlog was not simply a consequence of the court’s workload, but also of the way its business was organised and prioritised. “It demonstrated that the constitutional backlog was a failure of will and organization rather than of capacity,” he writes.

Justice Lalit’s approach reflected a willingness to use the administrative authority of the CJI to unlock cases that had remained pending for years. Justice Kaul also records Justice Lalit’s view that more judges should get the opportunity to sit on Constitution benches, rather than such assignments remaining concentrated among a limited group.

“Everybody should get a chance to sit on the constitution bench,” Justice Lalit said, according to Justice Kaul’s account.

Justice Lalit also introduced a more transparent process for collegium deliberations by circulating soft copies of judgments authored by candidates being considered for elevation. The practice, which allowed members to examine a candidate’s judicial work before taking a decision, continued under Justice Chandrachud, Justice Kaul writes.

But Justice Kaul’s account is not an unqualified endorsement of every aspect of Justice Lalit’s administrative approach. He expresses reservations about the pressure to meet ambitious daily disposal targets and the tendency to measure performance through the volume of cases listed or decided. The sheer number of matters handled, he suggests, cannot be the only measure of a court’s effectiveness.

Justice Lalit’s tenure nevertheless left a mark because it showed how quickly administrative changes could translate into hearings and decisions on matters that had languished. His initiatives addressed both the substantive backlog of constitutional cases and the institutional practices that determined which matters reached a bench.

“On the whole, I had an excellent working relationship with Chief Justice Lalit. He organized another presentation to the full court while departing, on the work done during his time, and I think he can be justly proud of having made an impact,” Justice Kaul writes.