Date with Data on judicial appointments dataset
We organised our first ‘Date with Data’ last week with Prof. Rangin Tripathy and a very interesting group of researchers, journalists, lawyers and data scientists, discussing stories that can be told leveraging datasets on appointments of judges.
If you missed it, here is a quick recap for you. Below are some interesting insights or questions that can be explored using existing data on appointments of judges available on Justice Hub:
What is the trajectory of judges who are appointed to the SC? For example, Prof. Rangins analysis shows that chances of a judge from the subordinate judiciary to constitute 20% of the appointments in the Supreme Court but under the collegium that figure is only 3%. Similarly, when the executive was appointing the judges more than 10% of them resigned but the figure under collegium system is only 1.47%.
Have collegiums followed a policy of ensuring regional and gender balance? For example Prof. Rangins analysis shows that Southern states are losing representation in the Supreme Courts and there are always judges from Delhi represented in the Supreme Court. What are the factors behind these changes?
What is the correlation between the background of judges and their post-retirement jobs? Is there a correlation with respect to their gender/caste? For example, Prof. Madhav Aney’s work suggests that authoring one judgement in favour of the government increases the likelihood of a judge being appointed to a position post retiring from the Supreme Court by anything between 13% and 17%. Are judges from certain genders or castes preferred over the others by the government when being considered for a post retirement job?
Among others, a key question that was raised by participants was “Can the data on the background of judges can help us better understand the quality of adjudication?” Prof. Rangin shared that while it is possible to assess the quality of adjudication from a technical aspect (i.e. is the judgement easily readable or contain redundant information), it is hard to determine a good or bad judgement as judges have not been traditionally placed in ideological brackets in India.
Prof. Rangin also shared that apart from the quality of adjudication, the direction of judgement could also be influenced by some subtle factors. For example, there was criticism of the Supreme Court of India recently for diluting the Prevention of Atrocities Act. While one could conclude that this could be a result of having a caste homogenous judiciary there are other factors that need to be studied to understand if the upbringing of a judge correlates with the kind of judgement delivered.
The Bigger Opportunity for Action
Unfortunately there are significant data gaps on the backgrounds of judges. Often basic information such as professional background and even education information are usually not found on the websites of the Supreme Court and High Court. To bridge this, it is critical we:
Collate data that tells us more about our judges from different sources and share it so that we can co-relate our datasets.
Share RTI and other applications we have filed with courts to surface the kind of data that people are looking for and are unable to get.
Highlight these data gaps to the judiciary as there is no clear path to address some of data gaps through official channels. For example, like Courts in Argentina have done, should we ask for disclosures on companies judges worked for or had as clients before they were appointed? Sharing this might also ease the effort the institution needs to put into while catering to RTI requests.
Are you someone who has filed RTI to get data on judicial appointments? Do you have ideas on how we could identify and fill the data gaps? Let us know your thoughts here.
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Missed the Date with Data ? Watch the session recording on this link: