The Verdictum: Justice AK Ganguly

Each week, The Verdictum analyses the number of judgments delivered by a retired judge of the Supreme Court. This week, we examine the number of judgments delivered by Justice Ashok Kumar Ganguly..Elevated to the Supreme Court on December 17, 2008 at the age of 61, Justice Ashok Kumar Ganguly served as a judge of the Supreme Court for a total of 1,144 days. His tenure at the top court lasted for three years, one month and eighteen days, with J. Ganguly retiring on February 3, 2012. A judge of different High Courts for close to fifteen years, J. Ganguly was also the Chief Justice of Orissa as well as the Madras High Court..As a Supreme Court judge, J. Ganguly was involved in the delivering of five-hundred and fifty five judgments, out of which he authored one hundred and thirteen. He was also involved in twenty-eight judgments delivered by a Bench that consisted of at least three judges. .Month-wise breakup.Given below is the month-wise break up of his judgments throughout his tenure, with the most prolific months being April (124 judgments) followed by February (106 judgments) and May (69 judgments). The least productive months were December (15 judgments) followed by August (19 judgments) and November (20). While the high number of judgments in April and May could be explained by the fact that the courts close for summer vacations by the end of May, the figures for February do not necessarily support this logic. Another notable fact is that the month of July saw a total of twenty-seven judgments. This flies in the face of oft used justification for summer vacations as a time for writing judgments..Year-wise distribution of judgments.The maximum number of judgments was delivered in the year 2009, the same year where J. Ganguly was paired with either J. Pasayat or J. GS Singhvi. The second period of twelve months saw a remarkable dip in number of judgments (84) while the third one saw a slight increase to 100..Bench-wise distribution of judgments .If you consider the Bench-wise distribution of judgments, the staggering majority was delivered when J. Ganguly sat with either J. GS Singhvi (178 judgments) or J. Arijit Pasayat (240 judgments). Combined, this would account for 418 or more than 75 per cent of the total judgments delivered by Ganguly during his tenure..But perhaps what is even more interesting is that these numbers indicate how effective, or otherwise, is the roster system of the Supreme Court when it comes to rotating Benches. It would appear that J. Ganguly spent the majority of his tenure with either J. Singhvi or J. Pasayat, with barely any judgments delivered along with another Bench. For instance, with JJs Balakrishnan and Aftab Alam, only one judgment was delivered; with JJ’s Thakur and Raveendran two each..Concluding remarks.Given that we have just recently re-started collecting this data, it is too early to come with any concrete conclusions on the justice delivery system of the Supreme Court. Nonetheless, this data does provide some indications on how Supreme Court judges function. For instance, the relatively low number of judgments delivered in the month of July – it will be interesting to see if this is common for all judges or whether J. AK Ganguly’s data is an aberration. Another link worth following up is how the rosters are constituted and case-load allocated. Going forward, we also plan on segregating the judgments on the basis of their subject matter; this would also help understand what kind of cases are allocated to which judge..You can also read The Verdictum of JJ Deepak Verma and SH Kapadia.(Bar & Bench would like to thank interns Amiya Pati and Aishwarya Dhakarey for their research and assistance in data compilation)