The Court’s Decline

Some thoughts on the Naz decision, here. In many ways, the shameful decision is a consequence of what has been unfolding in India for a few years now, where there an emphasis only on outcomes. The line between the legal process and the political process has been jettisoned and core judicial values like independence, rationality, and finality have been betrayed in the past three decades through forms of adjudication whose culprits are judges, lawyers, and litigants alike. The upshot of this has been that the Supreme Court no longer believes it needs to attend to matters like precedent, the textual content of legal materials, doctrinal coherence, and so forth. The running joke is that there is not one Supreme Court of India but many – the verdict you get will turn on which courtroom your matter gets listed in.