The Verdictum: Justice Ranjana Prakash Desai

The Verdictum examines the judgments delivered by a retired judge of the Supreme Court. Along with an analysis of the numbers, The Verdictum also analyses various facts and figures associated with the judge. This week, we examine the judgments delivered by Justice Ranjana Prakash Desai..Justice Ranjana Prakash Desai was elevated to the Supreme Court on September 12, 2011 thereby becoming the fifth woman judge in the history of the Supreme Court. She had a tenure that lasted a little over three years, or 1142 days, till she retired on October 29, 2014..Justice Desai graduated from Elphinstone College in 1970 with a bachelor’s degree in arts, and went on to pursue law at Government Law College, Mumbai. She began practising in 1973 and worked with her father SG Samant, an eminent criminal lawyer. She was appointed Special Public Prosecutor for preventive detention matters in 1986 and went on the become Government Pleader on the appellate side in the Bombay High Court..She was elevated to the Bombay High Court Bench as an Additional Judge on April 15, 1996. Two years later, she was appointed Permanent Judge of the High Court..Post-retirement from Supreme Court, Justice Desai was appointed Chairperson of the Appellate Tribunal for Electricity, a post that she has been holding since December 2014..Month-wise distribution of judgments.Justice Desai was involved in a total of 178 judgments during her tenure as a Supreme Court judge. January and April are the most productive months for Justice Desai, with 25 judgments each. This is closely followed by 23 in July and 19 in September. The least productive months were June (0) and May (7)..Daily Productivity.In terms of daily productivity, Justice Desai delivered most judgments in the month of April, at the rate of 0.28 judgments per day. This is closely followed by January, with 0.27 judgments per day and July, with 0.25 judgments per day. Discounting the vacation month of June, the least productive months are May, at 0.07 judgments per day, followed by October and March at 0.08 and 0.12 judgments per day respectively..Year-wise distribution of judgments.2013 was the most productive month for Justice Desai. She was involved in 70 judgments during the penultimate year of her tenure. She was part of 52 judgments during her final year, 2014. 2011, the year of her elevation was the least productive, at 14 judgments..Bench-wise distribution.Out of the 178 judgements she was part of, Justice Desai delivered 66 of them sitting with Justice Aftab Alam. To put that in perspective, that is 37% of the cases she adjudicated in the Supreme Court. She was involved in 6 Constitution bench judgments. She was also part of 25 judgments delivered by a three-judge bench..She has delivered a total of 22 judgments sitting with the Chief Justice’s bench. A majority of these were with Chief Justice Sathasivam. She was also part of 30 judgments with Justice Madan Lokur..Case-type distribution.61.7% of the judgments Justice Desai was involved with were criminal appeals. She also adjudicated on 51 civil appeals..Important Judgments.Justice Desai has been involved in a number of high profile and landmark judgments. Out of the 178 judgments and orders, she has authored 72. She has adjudicated cases based on a wide variety of topics including Patents law in the Novartis appeal, extra-judicial killings under the guise of the AFSPA in Manipur, the 2013 Muzzafarnagar riots and Lalu Prasad Yadav’s fodder scam..She was also part of the bench that overruled the landmark Bhatia International case and held that Part I of the Arbitration Act applied only to arbitrations in India. Another interesting case was PUCL v. Union of India in 2004, in which the right to cast a negative vote during elections was upheld.