The Verdictum: Justice Aftab Alam

Each week, The Verdictum examines the judgments delivered by a retired judge of the Supreme Court. Along with analysis of the numbers, The Verdictum also analyses various facts and figures associated with the judge. This week, we examine the number of judgments delivered by Justice Aftab Alam..Appointed to the Supreme Court on November 12, 2007 Justice Aftab Alam had a tenure of nearly two thousand days* in the apex court. Enrolled as an advocate in 1973, Alam initially practiced before the Patna High Court, where he was designated as senior advocate at the young age of just thirty-five. Just over six years after being designated, he was elevated to the Patna High Court..In July of 2007, he was appointed the Chief Justice of the Jammu and Kashmir High Court. Interestingly, he was subsequently replaced by Justice KS Radhakrishnan, who recently passed a stinging judgment on the tactics employed by senior counsels in the SEBI Sahara matter..As a judge of the Supreme Court, Alam’s first judgment was delivered with Justice Arijit Pasayat, some nine days after Alam’s elevation to the Supreme Court, In all, Alam was involved in a total of 620** judgments, out of which he authored 126. The judge was also part of 86 judgments that were delivered by a Bench that had at least three judges..Year Wise Distribution of judgments.Justice Alam was involved in 249 judgments in the second year of his tenure, with the number dropping to less than half that the following year. The years that followed saw a decrease in the judgments with only 45 judgments delivered in the last complete year of his tenure. .Month-wise breakdown of judgments.Unlike Justice Swatanter Kumar, Alam was most productive in the month of August (87 judgments), although the total judgments in July was 85, followed by the month of January (82). The least productive months were May (23), March (32) followed by October (43).Day-wise productivity .Justice Alam delivered an average of judgments of 0.32 judgments per day over the course of his tenure with the month of August being the most productive (0.56) followed by July (0.55) and January (0.45). The least productive months were May (0.15) followed by March (0.17) and November (0.24).Bench-wise distribution of judgments.Justice Alam sat with an incredible thirty-two different judges during his tenure. That is thirteen more than his predecessor, Justice Swatanter Kumar and three times that of Justice Deepak Verma..His most productive Bench was with Justice Tarun Chattejree (120 judgments) followed by current Chief Justice of India, RM Lodha (96) and former Chief Justice of India, SH Kapadia (82).* Including court vacations.** Source: nic.judis.in.(Bar & Bench would like to thank interns Amiya Pati and Aishwarya Dhakarey for their research and assistance in data compilation)