Unlike Elected Government, Judges Don’t Go By Popular Morality, But By Constitutional Morality: CJI DY Chandrachud

Chief Justice of India DY Chandrachud, speaking at the Hindustan Times Leadership Summit 2023 on Saturday (4th November) said that judges don’t go by popular morality, but by constitutional morality. Constitutional morality, he explained, consists of those values of the constitution that the courts are intended to espouse such as fraternity, human dignity, personal liberty and equality.

“Judges don't look at how society would respond when they decide cases, that's exactly the difference between the elected arms of government & the judiciary,” he said.

While the elected arm of governance is intended to be responsive to the people, judges need to follow Constitutional morality, he said. Courts are a platform for engagement, where people feel that they will atleast have a space to exchange views and ideas to produce a new synthesis of change within society, he added.

When asked about his view on the recent pattern of the legislature passing laws to overrule the mandate of recent judgments of the Supreme Court, the CJI explained to the audience what is permissible and impermissible for the legislature to do, in this regard.

"There is a dividing line between what the legislature can and cannot do. If a judgment points out a deficiency in the law, it is open to the legislature to enact a fresh law to cure the deficiency. What the legislature cannot do is to overrule a judgment. But this is not happening for the first time. This has been happening in the tax arena. Validating acts are perfectly permissible, but directly overruling a judgment is completely impermissible," he said.

The CJI also said that the Supreme Court has recently been hearing some of the most difficult questions of our times.

“We can’t profess to be right. We are final not because we are right, but we are right because we are final. But that is no reason for the court to not answer the critical issues of our time. The work we do is open to criticism and broader social dialogue,” he said in this context.

During the interaction, he also explained that courts perform three critical functions, which is not just confined to deciding cases.

“The first and the most important is the cases we decide. But courts have also become important platforms for social engagement, not just for the verdicts we deliver, but for the space we create for dialogue between diverse segments of society. The third is the work which we do in our administrative capacity.”

He explained some of the administrative work done by the Supreme Court to bring transparency and accountability to the justice system.

“For instance, one of the critical barriers to access to justice is language. We have been in the process of translating Supreme Court judgments into various Indian languages, using AI assisted tools. The Courts must reach out to people so people understand what is going on in our courts,” he said.

He also talked about how the Supreme Court has begun livestreaming court proceedings. ”This is part of the process of confidence building, so people have an element of trust in the work we do,” he said.

He also added that the Supreme Court is in the process of transcribing court proceedings. The Supreme Court website has also been tweaked to make it more accessible to the visually impaired. “The technology we have deployed in the judicial system is democratizing access to justice. The idea behind this is to create transparency and accountability in the work of the court,” he said.

The CJI also highlighted that the Supreme Court is a court for the people. The Indian Supreme Court is not just the highest constitutional court, but also the court of final appeal, he explained. In that sense, it exercises a very wide jurisdiction as compared to other courts in the world, he said.

“Just to draw a comparison, the US Supreme Court decides about 80 cases a year, but our Supreme Court has already disposed of 72,000 cases this year with two more months to go. That gives you a sense of the difference in the work that we do,” he said.

With reference to the age of retirement of judges, CJI Chandrachud stated that he believes it is important for judges to retire. " It is too much of a responsibility to cast on human beings, in terms of their own infallibility, by postulating that they should not retire. Judges are human beings, we are prone to error, societies evolve,” he said.

"It is important to pass on the mantle to succeeding generations who can point out errors of the past and rejig the social legal framework for society to evolve," the CJI stated.