I have written a short piece on the DAKSH Blog asking why despite many Supreme Court orders and directions over the last 40 years, nothing much has changed in our criminal justice system. I argue that no effort has been made to build capacity, particularly on the administrative side, to give the subordinate judiciary a chance to implement these orders meaningfully.
So many orders, but not much change
Further reading
The first part of this analysis delved into the Supreme Court’s judgment in Ashok Kumar Sharma & Ors v. Union of India, where it misread the International Rule of Law (IRoL) by focusing on...
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Blurb: In his recent rejoinder, Dalmia clarifies the “expressed an opinion” standard to better define when recusal may be appropriate. He addresses the four rebuttals that the author...
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Very much agree with the underlying premise here that Indian judges need effective administrators to help them process cases. This raises the question though why this has not happened yet. As you likely know, there was an effort a few years ago to place such high end administrators in at least a handful of High Courts (for example, Mumbai). There was also an attempt to create a training program for them. My understanding is that this effort has largely ended. I’m not exactly sure why, but it would be interesting to find out – was it because of funding, because it was the effort of just one or two judges (i.e. yet another “pet project” of a specific judge to reform the judiciary instead of a project with wide buy-in), or was it because of resistance by the bar or the current court administration to change in how things are done? I do think that there will be another political moment to allow for the creation of such court administrators, but we should investigate what went wrong this last time to make sure that the next effort has a higher chance of success.