The Centre has agreed to conduct a study to find how the 14,000-odd trial court judges have been psychologically impacted by the continuous struggle to fight off 2.77 crore pending cases.  It informed the Supreme Court that it was ready to sanction Rs 35 crore for a five-year study to investigate the impact of pendency pressure on judicial officers and examine whether it adversely impacted the output of trial court judges....

-The Telegraph   The Supreme Court has set aside a Manipur magistrate’s preventive detention order against a member of the banned Kanglei Yawol Kanna Lup group, saying it had been passed “casually” based on fears he might get bail. The top court ruled that such orders couldn’t be passed just because the state apprehended that an accused might get bail from normal criminal courts or because a person had been charged with a...

Right to life and liberty cannot be taken away sans due procedure, says Supreme Court Observing that the right to life and liberty guaranteed to a citizen under Article 21 of the Constitution cannot be taken away without following due procedure, the Supreme Court has held that mere apprehension of the authorities that an accused was likely to be released on bail was not a ground for passing preventive detention orders. A...

-The Economic Times   All of us are bothered, or should be, about interminable delays in adjudication through formal legal systems. Gypsies are believed to have originated in India and there is a gypsy curse - may you have a lawsuit in which you are in the right. In 2010, there were 54,600 cases stuck in Supreme Court, 4.18 million in high courts and 27.89 million in lower (district and subordinate) courts. Pedantic...

The drama in the Rajya Sabha showed that the UPA government was not willing to go even by the will of Parliament. This gives rise to fundamental questions about the functioning of Indian democracy. The year 2011 will be remembered in India as the year of the campaign against corruption and for the Jan Lokpal Bill. The campaign began in January 2011 in the backdrop of the publicity that accompanied the...