Judging Judges by the Length of their Judgments is a Bad Idea

A reckless story in the Times of India recently drew outrage from the legal fraternity, including a number of reputed senior lawyers. The publication was of a suspicious letter by a fictitious litigant to the Chief Justice of India, casting serious aspersions on Justice Gita Mittal, a well-regarded judge of the Delhi high court. It begins with: “This batch of writ petitions preferred under Article 32 of the Constitution of India exposits cavil in its quintessential conceptuality and percipient discord between venerated and exalted right of freedom of speech and expression of an individual, exploring manifold and multilayered, limitless, unbounded and unfettered spectrums, and the controls, restrictions and constrictions, under the assumed power of “reasonableness” ingrained in the statutory provisions relating to criminal law to reviver and uphold one’s reputation.” As Tunku Varadarajan tellingly notes in a piece for The Wire, this sentence is “so convoluted – and so riddled with adjectives – as to be impenetrable to lawyer and lay reader alike.” The next sentence is even worse, “surpassing the first in verbosity, obfuscation, flabbiness, meandering length, and analytical ineptitude.” Or consider the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in a case dealing with the constitutionality of the National Tax tribunal. Perhaps illustrating the words of Mahatma Gandhi when he said: “Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s need, but not every man’s greed.” Even in the one decision that crossed the 100-page mark, she made it a point to offer a useful summary right at the start, including a table of contents, rendering it easy to navigate, access and appreciate. For it interfered deeply with the fundamental right to access courts, particularly for underprivileged sections that lived in the shadow of India’s “informal” economy and often did not carry any form of official identification.