Is the Rashtrapati Bhavan or Raj Bhavan-an Indian Buckingham Palace or a halfway house between it and the White House? – Wherever the Constitution requires the satisfaction of the President or the Governor for the exercise by the President or the Governor of any power or function, the satisfaction required by the Constitution is not the personal satisfaction of the President or Governor but the satisfaction of the President or Governor in the Constitutional sense in the Cabinet system of Government, that is, satisfaction of his Council of Ministers on whose aid and advice the President or the Governor generally exercise all his powers and functions.
Not the Potomac, but the Thames, fertilizes the flow of the Yamuna. if we may adopt a riverine imagery. In this thesis, we are fortified by precedents of this Court, strengthened by Constituent Assembly proceedings and reinforced by the actual working of the organs involved for about a silver jubilee’ span of time.
We, as judges dealing with a socially charged issue of constitutional law, must never forget that the Indian Constitution is a National Charter pregnant with social revolution, not a Legal Parchment barren of militant values to usher in a democratic, secular, socialist society which belongs equally to the masses including the harijan-girijan millions hungering for a humane deal after feudal colonial history’s long night.
We too have miles to go for law and justice to meet.
Absence of evidence is not equal to evidence of absence.
Common sense should not be kept in cold storage when pleadings are construed.
Law promotes order, not anomie.
Tiger balm is no serious cure for brain tumor.
‘Hurry Kills’ and ‘hasten slowly’ are mottos good for everyone who exercises power either at the wheel of an automobile or through the pen of a public functionary.
From Olympic team selection to orthopaedic expertise the judicial robes are invited to exercise umpire’s jurisdiction under our system.
Dictionaries are not dictators of statutory construction.
The rule of law will remain a mock phrase if law books are not within the reach of lawyers and Judges.
Bad law is worse than no law, for it makes people cynical about the legal order generally.
Sections of statutes calling for construction by courts are not petrified print but vibrant words with social functions to fulfil.
The law is for life and not against it, although it works through the words used. Therefore, a meaning which makes it effective rather than otherwise must find favour with us. And words themselves must receive that connotation which the ordinary, prudent man affected by the law and aware of the practices prevailing in that type of activity would give.
No Passport Officer shall be mini-Ceaser nor Minister incarnate Ceaser in a system where the rule of law reigns supreme.
The constitutional dharma, however, is not an unending deification of ‘backwardness’ and showering ‘classified homage, regardless of advancement registered, but progressive exorcising of the social evil and gradual withdrawal of artificial crutches.
While the right to appeal is statutory, the power to stay is discretionary.
Legality is within the Court’s province to pronounce upon, but canons of political propriety and democratic dharma are polemical issues on which judicial silence is the golden rule.
Foreign aid is helpful but in law, as in life, Indian genius must speak.
Pope Paul in opening the judicial year of the Second Roman Rota pontificated that delay in dispensing justice is ‘in itself an act of injustice’.
Judicial vigilance is the price of liberty and freedom of the person is a founding faith of our Republic.
Every litigation has a touch of human crises and, as here, it is but a legal projection of life’s vicissitudes.
In a democracy, news media and the men behind have a special value
Sharp practice by members of noble professions deserves even disbarment. The wages of sin is death.
Criminology and consciousness are partners in community protection.
To meet the needs of India today, the imperatives of Independence desiderate a creative role for the Court in interpretation and application, especially when enactments from the imperial mint govern.
The law will never make men free; it is men who have got to make the law free
Law regulates life and the problems of the law are really problems of life.
A litigation with a social dimension, even in a blinkered adversary system, serves a larger cause than the limited lis before the court.
Procedural tyranny compounded by lexically unwarranted technicality cannot be tolerated in a court.
Theoretical possibilities may not shake up, fancied weaknesses may not defeat, when verdicts are rested on sure foundations. Stray chances of innocence haunting the corridors of the court cannot topple concurrent findings of guilt.
We are disturbed that it is possible that small men become the victims of harsh law when there is no executive policy which guides prosecution of offenders
True, the right to life is more than mere animal existence or vegetable subsistence.
But it is one thing to affirm the jurisdiction, an other to authorise its free exercise like a bull in a China shop.
Law must move quick not merely in the Courts but also before tribunals and officers charged with the duty of expeditious administrative justice.
The controversy, in this case, may, without caricature, be described as a storm in a teacup.
Silence is not always golden.
The moral of this case is that a shortcut may often be a wrong cut-in law, as in life.
Let us get down to an open heart surgery in a limited way to check upon the soundness of this cardinal submission.
Infallibility is the attribute of the omniscient and judges can only act on pragmatic sense and reasonable doubts.
Were the policy of the law been plain, the language should have been clearer and the labours of courts could have been lesser.
If parties have been fair, the costs of the litigation must come out of the national exchequer, not out of as party’s purse
Whether this can be called laws delay or implementation gap is a matter of phraseology but the fact is that when the Legislature makes a law (especially, welfare law for the weaker section of the community) it is implicit that the benefits of the legislation to the consumers, therefore, shall not be delayed be the Executive by bringing it into force long years later. This is another dimension of laws delays not fully known to the public.
The difference between a suspension plus report and a recommendatory report is little more than between Tweedledum and Tweedledee.
Legal legerdemain is of no avail where larger constitutional interests are at stake.
Very often litigation becomes an alibi for official inaction
Possibly, Presidential power is wider but judicial power is embanked.
The pathology of litigative addiction ruins the poor of this country and the Bar has a role to cure this deleterious tendency of parties to launch frivolous and vexatious cases.
The long arm of the law must throttle such, litigative caricatures if the confidence and credibility of the community in the judicature is to survive
Every significant case has an unwritten legend and indelible lesson.
The law will relentlessly be enforced and the plea of poor finance will be poor alibi when people in misery cry for justice.
Indeed, natural justice is a pervasive facet of secular law where a spiritual touch enlivens legislation, administration and adjudication, to make fairness a creed of life. It has, many colours and shades, many forms and shapes and, save where valid law excludes it, applies when people are affected by acts of authority. It is the hone of healthy government, recognised from earliest times and not a mystic testament of Judge – made law. Indeed, from the legendary days of Adam — and of Kautilya’s Arthasastra — the rule of law has had this stamp of natural justice which makes it social justice
Natural justice is not a bull in china shop, nor a bee in one bonnet. Its essence is good conscience in a given situation; nothing more –but nothing less.
It is fundamental that compulsory taking of a man’s property is a serious matter and the smaller the man the more serious the matter. Hearing him before depriving him is both reasonable and pre-emptive of arbitrariness, and denial of this administrative fairness is constitutional anathema except for good reasons.
The law is not “a brooding omnipotence in the sky” but a pragmatic instrument of social order. It is an operational art controlling economic life, and interpretative effort must be imbued with the statutory purpose. No doubt, grammar is a good guide to meaning but a bad master to dictate.
The Court has to be vigilant when the case has been pending before it and not succumb to executive suggestion made in the form of an application for withdrawal with a bunch of papers tacked on. Moreover, the State should not stultify the Court by first stating that there is a true case to be tried and then make a volte face to the effect that on a second investigation the case has been discovered to be false.
To interdict, intercept or jettison an enquiry or trial in a court, save in the manner and to the extent provided for in the Code itself, is lawlessness. The even course of criminal justice cannot be thwarted by the executive, however, high the accused, however sure government feels a case is false, however unpalatable the continuance of the prosecution to the powers-that-be who wish to scuttle court justice because of hubris, affection or other noble or ignoble consideration.
Justicing, under our constitutional order, belongs to the judges. What the law has ignited, the law alone shall extinguish.
Credibility of testimony, oral and circumstantial, depends considerably on a judicial evaluation of the totality, not isolated scrutiny. While it is necessary that proof beyond reasonable doubt should be adduced in all criminal cases, it is not necessary that it should be perfect. If a case is proved too perfectly, it is argued that it is artificial; if a case has some flaws, inevitable because human beings are prone to err, it is argued that it is too imperfect. One wonders whether in the meticulous hypersensitivity to eliminate a rare innocent from being punished, many guilty men must be callously allowed to escape. Proof beyond reasonable doubt is a guideline, not a fetish and guilty man cannot get away with it because truth suffers some infirmity when projected through human processes. Judicial quest for perfect proof often accounts for police presentation of fool proof concoction. Why fake up? Because the Court asks for manufacture to make truth look true? No, we must be realistic.
To be literal in meaning is to see the skin and miss the soul. The judicial key to construction is the composite perception of the deha and the dehi of the provision
Mode of proof is geared to the goal of the qualification in question. It is subversive of sound interpretation and realistic decoding of the prescription to telescope the two and make both mandatory in point of time . What is essential is the possession of a diploma before the given date; what is ancillary is the safe mode of proof of the qualification. To confuse between a fact and its proof is blurred perspicacity.
Corroboration as a condition for judicial reliance on the testimony of a prosecutrix is not a matter of law, but a guidance of prudence under given circumstances. Indeed, from place to place, from age to age, from varying life styles and behavioural complexes, inferences from a given set of facts, oral and circumstantial, may have to be drawn not with dead uniformity but realistic diversity lest rigidity in the shape of rule of law in this area be introduced through a new type of precedential tyranny. The same observation holds good regarding the presence or absence of injuries on the person of the aggressor or the aggressed.
The morality of justice at the hands of law troubles a Judge’s conscience and points an angry interrogation at the law reformer. The processual law so dominates in certain systems as to overpower substantive rights and substantial justice. The humanist rule that procedure should be the handmaid, not the mistress, of legal justice compels consideration of vesting a residuary power in judges to act ex debito justiciae where the tragic sequel otherwise would be wholly inequitable. Justice is the goal of jurisprudence- processual, as much as substantive.
The concept of agrarian reform is a complex and dynamic one promoting wider interests than conventional reorganisation of the land system or distribution of land. It is intended to realise the social function of the land and includes — we are merely giving, by way of illustration, a few familiar proposals of agrarian reform — creation of economic units of rural production, establishment of adequate credit system, implementation of modern production techniques, construction of irrigation systems and adequate drainage, making available fertilisers, fungicides, herbicides and other methods of intensifying and increasing agricultural production, providing readily available means of communication and transportation, to facilitate proper marketing of the village produce, putting up of silos, warehouses etc. to the extent necessary for preserving produce and handling it so as to bring it conveniently within the reach of the consumers when they need it, training of village youth in modern agricultural practices with a view to maximising production and help solve social problems that are found in relation to the life of the agricultural community. The village man, his welfare, is the target.
A retired government official is sensitive to delay in drawing monetary benefits. And to avoid posthumous satisfaction of the pecuniary expectation of the superannuated public servant — not unusual in government.
The interpretative effort must be illumined by the goal though guided by the word. The key to the opening of every law is the reason and spirit of the law.
A label cannot salvage a statute from the clutches of constitutional limitations if the agrarian reform envisaged by it is “a teasing illusion or promise of unreality.
The safety of the person of an accused or complainant is an essential condition for participation in a trial and where that is put in peril by commotion, tumult or threat on account of pathological conditions prevalent in a particular venue, the request for a transfer may not be dismissed summarily. It causes disquiet and concern to a Court of justice if a person seeking justice is unable to appear, present one’s case, bring one’s witnesses or adduce evidence. Indeed, it is the duly of the Court to assure propitious conditions which conduce to comparative tranquillity at the trial. Turbulent conditions putting the accused’s life in danger or creating chaos inside the Court hall may jettison public justice. If this vice is peculiar to a particular place and is persistent the transfer of the case from that place may become necessary. Likewise, if there is general consternation or atmosphere of tension or raging masses of people in the entire region taking sides and polluting the climate, vitiating the necessary neutrality to hold a detached judicial trial, the situation may be said to have deteriorated to such an extent as to warrant transfer
Every new discovery of argumentative novelty cannot undo or compel reconsideration of a binding precedent.
To Christian education as a mission, even if true, is not to negate it being an Industry, we have to look at education activity from the angle of the Act and so viewed the ingredients of education are fulfilled. Education is, therefore, an industry nothing can stand in the way of that conclusion.
Medieval roads with treacherous dangers and. total disrepair, explosive increase of heavy vehicles often terribly overloaded and without cautionary signals, reckless drivers crazy with speed and tipsy with spirituous ‘potions, non enforcement of traffic regulations designed for safety but offering opportunities for systematised corruption and little else, and as a cumulative effect, mounting highway accidents, demand a new dimension to the law of torts through no fault liability and processual clarity and simplicity in compensation claims cases………. The jurisprudence of compensation for motor accidents must develop in the direction of non fault liability and the determination of the quantum must be liberal not niggardly, since the law values life and limb in a free country in generous scales.
The fine line of distinction between internal autonomy for educational bodies and insulation of their operations from judicial interference on the one hand and the constitutional obligation of the court to examine the legality of academic actions and correct clear injustices on the other is jurisprudentially real and the present appeal illustrates the demarcation between the two positions. While legal shibboleths like “hand-off universities” and meticulous forensic invigilation of educational organs may both be wrong, a balanced approach of leaving universities in their internal functioning well alone to a large extent, but striking at illegalities and injustices, if committed by however high an authority, educational or other, will resolve the problem raised by counsel before us in this appeal from a judgment of the Division Bench of the High Court. Once we recognise the basic yet simple proposition that no islands of insubordination to the rule of law exist in our Republic and that discretion to disobey the mandate of the law does not belong even to university organs or other authorities, the retreat of the Court at the sight of an academic body, as has happened here, cannot be approved.
If commonsense and common English are components of constitutional construction, relief against loans by scaling down, discharging, reducing interest and principal, and slaying the realisation of debts will, among other things, fall squarely within the topic. And that, in a country of hereditary Indebtedness on a colossal scale.
It is common place to state that legislative heads must receive large and liberal meanings and the sweep of the tense of the rubrics mast embrace the widest range. Even incidental and cognate matters come within their purview. The whole gamut of money-lending and debt-liquidation is thus within the State’s legislative competence.
It is becoming a frequent phenomenon in our country that court proceedings are being disturbed by rude hoodlums and unruly crowds, jostling, jeering or cheering and disrupting the judicial hearing with menaces, noises and worse. If this vice is peculiar to particular place and is persistent, the transfer of the case from that place may become necessary: Likewise, if there is general consternation or atmosphere of tension or raging masses of people in the entire region taking sides and polluting the climate, vitiating the necessary neutrality to hold a detached judicial trial, the situation may be said to have deteriorated to such an extent as to warrant transfer.
Our current processual jurisprudence is not of individualistic Anglo-Indian mould. It is broad based and people oriented, and envisions access to justice through ‘class actions’, public interest litigation, and ‘representative proceedings’. Indeed, little Indians in large numbers seeking remedies in courts through collective proceedings, instead of being driven to an expensive plurality of litigations, is an affirmation of participative justice in our democracy. We have no hesitation in holding that the narrow concept of ’cause of action’ and ‘person aggrieved’ and individual litigation is becoming obsolescent in some jurisdictions.
The ultimate censorious power over the Censors belongs to the people and by indifference, laxity or abetment, pictures which pollute public morals are liberally certified, the legislation, meant by Parliament to protect people’s good morals, may be sabotaged by statutory enemies within.
Judicial reform is upto now a tinkering exercise, not an engineering project but even that little tinkering is fiercely challenged as litigative anathema by the profession which is unfortunate.
Law must rise to the challenge of shocking criminology, especially when helpless women are the victims and the crime is committed in the secrecy of the husband’s home.