World's most aggressive courts in India

NEW DELHI: India has the "most aggressive" courts in the world which sometimes raps the government on its knuckles for mistakes, law minister Salman Khurshid said on Friday against the backdrop of judiciary's pro-active role on some issues. "I consider the three arms of the government to be in a cooperative mode. Sometimes, we do get rapped on the knuckles, not because someone is trying to snatch something away from us. We do make mistakes. We acknowledge and the court tells us what to do," Khurshid said. He said the executive and the legislature "also sometimes, periodically in Parliament, send some messages to courts saying that we feel you have exceeded your brief and you have to be careful. But it's an ongoing dialogue of democracy." Addressing the third Annual Legal Services Conference here, the minister said that he believed that India has the "most aggressive courts in the world", but added that some people might want to disagree with his view on the issue. Referring to the pendency of cases in various courts, he said Chief Justice of India Justice SH Kapadia was working towards finding a solution. "The Chief Justice of our country is determined to address the issue of pendency of cases," he said adding that tools like National Pendency Grid will help show the number of cases pending and the number of court adjournments to deal with the problem.
"Sometimes, shortcuts become counter-productive...we need to find more sophisticated tools by which both volume and quality can be monitored, incentivised and encouraged. And that''s the process in which we are involved," he said. Khurshid said in a lighter vein that lawyers in India do not have the term "brevity" in their lexicon and appreciated the system followed by the Supreme court of the US where a bell is sounded after an hour asking the lawyer to end his argument no matter how complicated the case is.
"The American Supreme Court's jurisdiction is microscopic as compared to the jurisdiction of the Indian Supreme Court. The work the American SC handles in a year is handled - in relative terms - on every Monday and Friday by every judge of our country," he said.About 60 to 70 cases are handled every Monday and Friday by SC judges sitting in Benches of two, he said, adding the American Supreme court sits in entire Bench of 11 deals with 60 cases a year."Of course they decide 60 cases a year. I am not saying that we decide 60 cases a year. But we do handle 60 cases a year. Still have to read a lot, listen to a lot," Khurshid said.On the issue of "economics of legal decision making", he said he was in touch with appellate judges for them to understand the issue."We have our economic analyses of law. But our economic analyzes of law has a lot to do with social welfare than to do with economic growth. But we have some outstanding judges, particularly judges who come from courts like the Bombay High Court who understand economic and accounts extremely well - our CJI being one of them," he said.The Minister claimed that India was gradually moving towards better understanding of the economic landscape."Some of the recent judgements will indicate that, although I can admit to you that some judgements have lost sight of the economic landscape. but on an aggregate, we are moving forward to understanding the economic reality of the world," he said.