By Shubh Arora
1. THE PROBLEM
The Supreme Court has delivered many landmark decisions in the recent past. The recent Ayodhya judgment[1] is a stupendous exhibit of the Court analyzing a voluminous record. The Court had to sift through volumes of documents supporting claims and counterclaims. This tiresome exercise was necessary to decide the historical dispute and goes on to justify the massive length of the judgment to a certain degree. Moreover, the judgment lays out its structure right at the beginning, which facilitates navigation through the judgment.
However, judgments that decide the constitutionality of a legal provision, frequently fail to justify the reams of paper their contents occupy. Undoubtedly, deciding the constitutional validity of a law requires the bench to expound on the enormous constitutional jurisprudence and its evolution. It requires an intensive analysis of a catena of case laws that have shaped the course of the issue at hand. The aim is to settle the law for the years to come. In this quest to deliver a thorough verdict, leaving no stone unturned, there have been instances of prolix accounts of law, with lesser additions to the relevant jurisprudence.
A major factor behind elongation is the reproduction of passages largely from judicial precedents[2], and even from books and other forms of legal scholarship. Given the technological tools in hand, the courts prefer to insert verbatim passages from various sources. The practice of condensing the major holdings of important precedents and views of different scholars has declined significantly. An appropriate illustration is the Triple Talaq case[3] where a reproduction of Constituent Assembly Debates, among several other verbatim quotations, occupies a chunk of the verdict.[4] The deployment of raw quotations on a massive scale can also be observed in Navtej Singh Johar v. Union of India[5]. The irresistible temptation to write a separate opinion even after concurring with the majority view has further led to much repetition. Such repetition is highlighted in KS Puttaswamy v. Union of India[6] and in Navtej Singh Johar where judges have showcased their dexterity by giving multiple opinions without laying down anything fundamentally different from one another.
Constant deviations from precision has become a feature of the lower judiciary as well. While the judges of the lower courts, unlike their superiors, rarely enjoy the freedom of alluding to literature in their verdicts, the length of their decisions increases because of needless detailing. In Smt. Shashi Shah v. Kiran Kumar Shah[7], the Allahabad High Court, while entertaining a 38-page judgment of a Family Court, observed that the Family Courts are behaving like Civil Courts while writing such lengthy judgments and this goes against their purpose of expeditious settlement of matrimonial disputes. In Gyanendra Kumar v. Pavan Kumar Seksaria[8], a judge of the Allahabad High Court, while examining a 78-page judgment of the Lower Appellate Court, was irked by the “unnecessarily lengthy judgments” of the lower courts “containing too much repetition”.
Even while deciding interlocutory matters, courts have “unnecessarily spent valuable public time in writing lengthy judgments”, as observed by the Court in Amina Ahmed Dossa v. State of Maharashtra[9]. Eleven years after this judgment, the Allahabad High Court was again found annoyed by a 15-page order of a Civil Judge in deciding an application for a temporary injunction.[10] The Court observed that such an order should not exceed 2 or 3 pages.[11] The High Courts have often criticized the lower courts for writing unnecessarily lengthy judgments, but in Surjeet Singh v. Sadhu Singh[12], the Apex Court rebuked the Himachal Pradesh High Court for going overboard by referring to several decisions in detail in its 60-page order.
2. THE IMPACT
The prolixity in judgments creates impediments for multiple stakeholders. First, it causes wastage of time and efforts of the bench itself. The valuable time of the bench squandered in writing unnecessarily lengthy verdicts could be directed to deciding other cases.[13] The verbosity also torments the judges sitting for review or revision as they have to necessarily read the judgment in its entirety to examine the ruling. Many a time the appellate courts have been consternated by the length of the orders and have sought brevity for their own sake.[14]
A delay in the process of law also becomes inevitable, wasting much time of the litigants.[15] Their respective lawyers also have to spend valuable time in understanding the crux of the decision and assessing the next course of action. In such scenarios where even the lawyers explore the contents distastefully, the parties affected by the decision cannot be expected to read the very document that decides their fate in the given situation.
The situation changes from the micro to the macro level when the judgments are those delivered by the Supreme Court, which may have numerous stakeholders across the country. The judgment may have a significant bearing on the rights and obligations of a group, and it becomes important for them to understand what was exactly laid down. A first-hand familiarity with the decision prevents misinformation with regards to the reasoning behind the final verdict. It may further reduce dependence on the press as a media for dissemination where the information is subject to different interpretations and even distortions. The long, intricate structure of legalese the Supreme Court delivers as judgments disallows a direct cognizance of the decisions by the many people they affect. It is true that the common masses seldom read judgments. However, verdicts should be such that even a lay person is able to appreciate its contents.[16] Let alone appreciation, the length practically deters even a plain non-cognitive reading of the text in its entirety. The judgments today are available in the public domain, but their contents may be inaccessible, in the truest sense, to the laypersons due to their inordinate length.
The audience of these judgments has been reduced by the Apex Court because of its inability to incorporate precision in its verdicts.[17] This is extremely problematic. Critical engagement with judgments of the Supreme Court is essential for meaningful discourses on the many implications for the stakeholders. While academics and scholars may not shy away from critically analyzing judgments of unrealistic length, the level of commitment in term of time and energy that this task requires reduces the overall quality of the discourse. The bulkiness thwarts newer perspectives by keeping a huge audience from reading the full contents.
3. THE WAY AHEAD
Justice Chinnappa Reddy, in Life Insurance Corporation of India v. Escorts Ltd.[18], contemplated putting a page limit on the length of judgments, while aptly linking the bulkiness to the “growing weight of judicial burden”. While there is no need to effectuate such a drastic imposition, there is certainly a need for conciseness. It is important to understand that it is not the role of judges to act like scholars writing a thesis on a particular branch of law.[19] A judgment is not a medium to showcase the sagacity of the bench.[20] The time of a judge is valuable and must be utilized judiciously. A significant chunk of the court’s delays can be reduced by checking verbosity in the verdicts.[21] With the aid of technology and judicial clerks, it has indeed become easier to ‘assemble’ multiple layers of legal wisdom to embellish the decision.[22] Our courts should nevertheless attempt to weave judgments that are welcomed for clarity and brevity and not mocked for impertinence and verbosity. Such an approach is likely to further the cause of justice which our courts strive to uphold.
The Supreme Court has, on multiple occasions, slammed High Courts for using language so complex that it becomes extremely difficult to comprehend the judgments.[23] Such judgments have been criticized for not being reader-friendly. There is a need for a similar stance for unnecessarily lengthy judgments.[24] The courts, including the Apex Court, should be mindful of the audiences of their judgments. They should strive to justify the numerous reproductions from assorted legal scholarship incorporated in their verdicts. At the grassroots level, judicial academies should train young judges the “necessity and beauty of brevity” in writing judgments.[25]
Technology can be employed at the higher level to mitigate the effect of reproduction of passages from different sources including case law. The digital version of the judgments may contain a hyperlink leading the readers to the relevant passage reproduced. This can significantly reduce the length of the judgments giving the users the option to conveniently refer to the passages if they desire to.
There exists a temptation to exempt the Supreme Court’s judgments, which develop the law and evolve rights previously unknown, from adhering to brevity.[26] However, for this very reason, the obligation to practice brevity becomes heavier.It becomes all the more important for a monumental judgment to be appreciable by a larger number, and inordinate length disallows such appreciation. Such landmark judgments should limit digressions immaterial to the relevant issue, for the much needed lucidity for future references.
A caveat becomes necessary here. The Law Commission correctly recognized that conciseness should not come at the cost of completeness.[27] Emphasizing on the need to strike a balance between brevity and thoroughness, it stated –
“The stress on brief judgments should certainly not provide a cover for mental lethargy nor an alibi for intellectual dishonesty.”[28]
It is high time that our courts realize the need and importance of brevity in the judgments they deliver. They must uphold their commitment towards increasing inclusivity of the common masses in the system of justice.
The author, Shubh Arora, is currently a law student at the National Law University, Delhi.
[1] M Siddiq (D) v. Mahant Suresh Das, 2019 SCC OnLine SC 1440.
[2] Rashmi Metaliks Ltd. v. Kolkata Metropolitan Development Authority, (2013) 10 SCC 95 ¶7; Khare and Tarkunde Infrastructure Pvt. Ltd. v. State of Maharashtra, (2015) 3 Mah LJ 668 ¶9.
[3] Shayara Bano v. Union of India, (2017) 9 SCC 1.
[4] Id., ¶257.
[5] (2018) 1 SCC 791.
[6] (2017) 10 SCC 1.
[7] (1999) 35 ALR 232 ¶10.
[8] (2012) 19 ALR 696 ¶3.
[9] (2001) 2 SCC 675 ¶9.
[10] Rajesh Kumar v. Rajendra Kumar Saxena, (2013) 96 ALR 597 ¶6.
[11] Id. ¶7.
[12] (2019) 2 SCC 396 ¶3.
[13] Gyanendra Kumar v. Pavan Kumar Seksaria, (2012) 19 ALR 696 ¶3.
[14] Id.
[15] Amina Ahmed Dossa v. State of Maharashtra, (2001) 2 SCC 675 ¶9.
[16] Justice Manmohan Sarin, Judgment Writing, available at http://nja.nic.in/J_Writing.pdf (Last visited on April 13, 2020); R.V. Raveendran, Rendering Judgments – Some Basics, 10 SCC J-1 (2009).
[17] The Print, Supreme Court’s nearly 500-page order on Sec 377: Are India’s judges most erudite or too verbose?, September 7, 2018, available at https://theprint.in/talk-point/supreme-courts-nearly-500-page-order-on-sec-377-are-indias-judges-most-erudite-or-too-verbose/113607/ (Last visited on April 12, 2020).
[18] (1986) 1 SCC 264 ¶2.
[19] Law Commission of India, Delay and Arrears in Trial Courts, Report no. 77, ¶7.5 (November 1978).
[20] Id.
[21] May 1, 1969 Law’s Delays and Law Reporting, 1 SCC J-7 (1969).
[22] Supra note 17.
[23] The Print, SC slams Bombay HC for ‘unintelligible’ order, but courts are full of convoluted rulings, November 7, 2019, https://theprint.in/india/governance/judiciary/sc-slams-bombay-hc-unintelligible-order-courts-full-of-convoluted-rulings/317171/ (Last visited on April 16, 2020).
[24] The Times of India, Supreme Court judges bat for succinct judgments, (2014) https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Supreme-Court-judges-bat-for-succinct judgments/articleshow/45017501.cms (Last visited on April 16, 2020).
[25] Gyanendra Kumar v. Pavan Kumar Seksaria, (2012) 19 ALR 696 ¶3.
[26] Supra note 17.
[27] Law Commission of India, Delay and Arrears in Trial Courts, Report no. 77, ¶7.6 (November 1978).
[28] Id.
The Journal of Indian Law and Society 