The Verdictum Comparison: Analysing ten judges of the Supreme Court of India

Since 2012, Bar & Bench has been chronicling the tenures of Supreme Court judges, or rather the number of judgments, as part of The Verdictum series. Each Verdictum column analysed the various facts and figures associated with a recently retired apex court judge. The information gathered included the daily and monthly productivity of judges, how many times they sat with another judge, the type of cases they ruled on, and much more..In this column, we compare the statistics pertaining to the last ten Supreme Court judges to retire barring Justice AK Patnaik and former CJI RM Lodha. To this end, we found out how many rulings each judge made, how many times they were a part of a five-judge bench, how many judgments they authored, and a bunch of other data..So what do the numbers reveal?.JudgePrincipal High CourtTenure (in days)No. of rulingsKS Radhakrishnan J.Kerala1,640362SS Nijjar J.Punjab & Haryana1,662293BS Chauhan J.Allahabad1,876586CK Prasad J.Patna1,617500RP Desai J.Bombay1,142178SJ Mukhopadhaya J.Patna1,309302HL Dattu CJ.Karnataka2,631586V Sen J.Delhi1,101189MY Eqbal J.Patna1,145233FMI Kalifulla J.Madras1,572190.It is interesting to note that three of these ten – CK Prasad, SJ Mukhopadhaya and MY Eqbal JJ – hail from the Patna High Court. Just one of them, Justice Ranjana Prakash Desai, is a woman judge..The average tenure is around four years, or 1,500 days; the tenure can be as short as 1,101 days, as was the case for Vikramajit Sen J, or as high as 2,631 as was the case for CJI Dattu..Productivity.This section compares the number of rulings with the length of tenure. By doing this, we were able to gauge the monthly and daily productivity of each judge. Bear in mind that the number of days in the tenure include vacations, weekends and public holidays..Monthly productivity.Justice BS Chauhan, with 586 rulings during his tenure, proves to be one of the most productive judges in recent times, having passed an average of 9.6 orders and judgments per month. Justice CK Prasad is not far behind, with 9.25 rulings per month..On the other end of the spectrum, Justice FMI Kalifulla, the last judge to retire from the apex court, has a monthly rate of just 3.66 rulings. RP Desai J passed just 4.7 rulings per month in her tenure, while Vikramajit Sen J. had a monthly average of 5.25..Daily productivity.If the figures pertaining to the these ten judges are anything to go by, a Supreme Court judge passes an average of 0.2 rulings per day. Among those with a ruling/day statistic below 0.2 were Justices Kalifulla, Desai, Sen and Nijjar JJ, with 0.12, 0.15, 0.17 and 0.17 rulings per day, respectively..Justices Chauhan and Prasad again lead the charts with 0.31 and 0.3 rulings per day respectively..Three-judge and Constitution benches.Another statistic analysed was the number of times each judge appeared on a three-judge bench as well as one comprising five or more judges. .BS Chauhan J and former Chief Justice of India HL Dattu lead the way with the most number of 3-judge bench rulings, at 60 and 57 respectively. Justice Kalifulla was a part of a 3-judge bench a mere three times..Quite surpisingly, Justice Kalifulla has been a part of a Constitution bench more times than his brother judges, with the exception of Justice Nijjar, who sat on a bench of five or more judges 11 times, and Justice KS Radhakrishnan, with 9 times. It is interesting to note that former CJI Dattu was part of a Constitution bench only 3 times during his tenure..Judgments authored.BS Chauhan J once again leads the pack, having authored a whopping 255 judgments out of the 586 rulings he was involved. MY Eqbal J. also has a high number of authored judgments, with 120 of the 233 matters he was involved. Justice Radhakrishnan authored exactly half the rulings he was involved in (181 out of 362)..On the other hand, Justice CK Prasad authored a mere 83 judgments out of the 500 rulings he was part of. Former CJI Dattu also has a similarly low number of authored judgments (105) as compared to the 586 judgments he was involved in..The question to be asked is whether mere figures can shed light on the quality of a judge. For example, there may be certain extraneous factors that determine how many cases a judge gets to decide, which could adversely affect the number of rulings he makes..What these figures do, however, is give an inkling of how things work in the higher judiciary, at a time when there is a perceived notion that the “last bastion” suffers from a lack of transparency.