Supreme Court of India

I review literature attempting to determine the criteria for appointment of judges to the Supreme Court of India. I show that these studies are limited by data-sources including especially the lack of data about the potential candidate pool for Supreme Court appointments. I show that the court itself has been lax in making the process transparent, and published collegium meeting resolutions have gradually become more sparse and less informative over time. Starting as detailed resolutions with candidate information, these resolutions are now mere statements with just the names of recommended candidates.

I look at three examples of early practices of the Supreme Court of India that highlight how little we know about the institutional history of the court 1) There was a regional bench of the court in Hyderabad, with ad-hoc judges to hear cases 2) There were many even-numbered sized panels of the court suggesting a norm of en banc hearing of important constitutional cases 3) There are examples of seriatim-judgement writing by the court, where all participating judgements gave seperate opinions.

Analyzing over 23000 hearings, I examine if the time when a case is heard in the Supreme Court of India affects either the allocation of oral hearing time or decision-making in that case. I find no evidence that time of hearing or day of the week affects judicial decision-making. I find some evidence that the court takes longer to hear similar cases later in the day.

Delhi Law Review (2020)
An empirical analysis of the vacancies in the Supreme Court of India that shows that there have been, on average, more vacancies in the SCI since 2015 than any other comparable period in recent history. The paper argues that the collegium system is at least partly responsible for the inefficiency in judicial appointments at the highest court.