Written submissions to courts could speed up the delivery of justice

livemint.com:

In their book, The Court on Trial, Aparna Chandra, Sital Kalantry and William Hubbard have taken a data-driven approach to assessing the performance of the Indian Supreme Court. Using data-sets created from over a million Supreme Court cases, they try to find answers to whether our apex court is in fact a “people’s court"; whether certain individuals (senior counsels with high name recognition) have inordinate influence on outcomes; whether the Chief Justice (as Master of the Roster) has outsize influence through the ability to strategically assign cases to benches of his or her choice; and whether the promise of post-retirement postings could influence judicial decisions towards the end of a judge’s term.

There are some elements of the book that I do not fully agree with, such as the methodology adopted to assess whether in fact the Supreme Court is a “people’s court." To do this, the authors looked at case-admission data and argued that it is in fact a people’s court because the evidence suggests that the Court admits more cases that are unlikely to win than not. This, to me, is a roundabout way of arriving at this conclusion.

Surely, it would have been more straightforward to simply count the number of cases filed by laypersons or those without any privilege, and calculate what proportion of them were admitted. Rather that evaluating access as a function of whether a case is weak or strong, we should examine whether those of a particular class or status have as much of a chance as anyone else to get justice from the Indian judiciary.

That said, there were a number of other insights that were useful. For instance, their data on the backlog of cases in the Supreme Court were quite revealing: close to 40% of all cases in