Judiciary Cannot Seek Public Confidence By Placing Itself Beyond Scrutiny: CJI Surya Kant

Chief Justice of India Surya Kant on Monday stressed that the Judiciary cannot seek public confidence by placing itself beyond scrutiny and must remain willing to be examined, questioned and criticised.

Delivering the 6th Ram Jethmalani Memorial Lecture in New Delhi on “Justice Seen to Be Done: Transparency and Public Trust as Pillars of the Legal System”, Justice Kant highlighted that fair, informed and constructive criticism of judicial functioning was necessary for institutional accountability and self-correction.

“The Judiciary, as an institution, is not, and cannot be, averse to criticism,” the CJI reiterated, referring to the Supreme Court's recent suo motu proceedings concerning an NCERT textbook.

“Fair, informed and constructive critique of judicial functioning” is a “legitimate and necessary feature of a vibrant constitutional democracy”, he reiterated.

“This lies at the heart of transparency itself, for a Court cannot seek the confidence of the public by placing itself beyond scrutiny; it must remain willing to be examined, questioned and, where necessary, criticised,” CJI Kant stressed.

The CJI emphasised that transparency in judicial functioning was not merely about open courtrooms and public hearings. It also required the reasoning behind judicial decisions to be open to examination, including by those against whom the decision was rendered.

“It means that the reasoning behind a decision, and not merely its result, can be examined by anyone who cares to look, including the very people the decision goes against,” he said.

He added, “A Court that announces its verdicts but keeps its reasoning to itself has not really been transparent, whatever else it may have done.”

CJI Kant also drew a distinction between public trust and public approval, saying courts do not earn trust simply by being liked or by delivering outcomes that people wanted.

“A Court does not earn trust by being liked, or by handing out the outcomes people wanted,” he said.

Instead, the CJI said, trust is earned when people who lose cases still believe that the process which decided against them was fair.

“It earns trust when the people who lost, who wanted an entirely different result, still walk away believing that the process which decided against them was a fair one. That is a far harder thing to earn than approval, and far more valuable,” he said.

Justice Kant referred to research by legal scholar Tom R. Tyler on why people obey the law. He noted that the research showed that people who lose cases but feel that the process was fair tend to retain almost as much confidence in the justice system as those who win their cases but feel that the process unfairly favoured the other side.

“Winning, it turns out, is not really what buys a Court its legitimacy, but fairness of process is,” he said.

The CJI traced the principle that justice must not only be done but must also be seen to be done to the 1924 English judgment in R v. Sussex Justices. The case concerned a court clerk who also worked for a firm involved in related litigation. Although there was no evidence that the clerk had influenced the magistrates, the conviction was set aside because the appearance of a conflict was sufficient to undermine public confidence.

“A hundred years on, that case is still why we judge a decision by more than whether it was right. We ask whether it looked right, too, to the people who had to live with it,” Justice Kant said.

He cautioned, however, that transparency cannot simply mean putting court proceedings under a public spotlight. Recalling Ram Jethmalani's role in the Nanavati trial, he highlighted that intense media attention could coexist with an unfair public perception of a trial.

“A Courtroom thrown wide open to a press with sympathies of its own is not quite the same thing as a Courtroom that is truly just. “Seen to be done,” then, cuts both ways. It is a discipline we must practise, not merely a spotlight we may switch on,” he said.

Justice Kant also linked public trust to the nature of judicial authority. Referring to Alexander Hamilton's The Federalist No. 78, he noted that the other branches of government possess either the power of the purse or the power of the sword, while the Judiciary has “neither FORCE nor WILL, but merely judgment”.

“Its authority exists only for as long as people continue to believe, unforced, that it truly deserves to be obeyed,” he noted.

Calling public trust the Judiciary's “only currency”, Justice Kant said such trust cannot be earned once and relied upon permanently.

“That trust is not something any institution can earn once and then, simply rely on forever. It has to be renewed continuously,” he said.

The CJI also spoke about access to justice, highlighting that the existence of a courthouse was not enough. An ordinary citizen must be able to reach the system, understand what is happening within it and be confident that reaching it was not itself “half the battle”.

He referred to measures under the eCourts project, including a single sign-on portal, electronic delivery of summons and integration between prison and court records. He also mentioned the e-Committee's recent flagging off of e-Sewa Kendra mobile vans carrying eCourts services and legal aid to citizens' doorsteps.

Concluding the lecture, Justice Kant recalled Jethmalani's advocacy for transparency and accountability and said the legal system must ensure that transparency is treated as a foundation, public trust is nurtured and justice is not only done but “seen to be done”.