Major Cases And The Collegium: A Study

How CJIs involved senior colleagues in benches of 3 judges and more.

- Srinivasan Ramani & Varun B. Krishnan

Chief Justice Dipak Misra’s role as Master of the Roster was called into question by the other four judges in the Supreme Court collegium in January. While their complaint was about cases being “assigned selectively” to benches of “preference”, how have members of the collegium been represented in major cases (those with bench sizes of three or more)?

A look at the numbers since January 1999, when the collegium was expanded to five judges, is revealing. It shows that the representation of collegium members other than the CJI — that is, those ranked two to five — is among the lowest during Chief Justice Misra’s term.

Until January 12, when Justices J. Chelameswar, Ranjan Gogoi, Madan B. Lokur and Kurian Joseph held their unprecedented press conference, collegium members (two to five) were involved only in 29.3% of the judgments delivered. Of the 17 CJIs since January 1999, it was only during Justice G.B Pattanaik’s term as CJI that the representation of the four collegium members was less. At 29.2%, it was less only by the smallest of fractions. .