New Delhi:

Having started practising law nearly 30 years ago and then retiring as the longest-serving Chief Justice of India in over a decade, Justice DY Chandrachud did not only get a ringside view of how courts function but also helped shape jurisprudence in the country with a string of important judgments, including on electoral bonds, the validity of Article 370 and same-sex marriage. 

On Wednesday, the former Chief Justice sat down for a wide-ranging interview with NDTV in which he spoke about everything from how he almost became an economist and the paltry fees he got for his first case to the criticisms levelled against judges and the Supreme Court.

Justice Chandrachud also addressed a colleague’s remarks of him being harsh on a former judge of the Supreme Court and spoke about the need for revisiting and overturning earlier judgments – even those by his father and former Supreme Court Chief Justice YV Chandrachud.

Early Days

On a question about his experiences and what he learnt from his father, Justice Chandrachud said his first choice was to pursue a post-graduate degree in Economics. Later, when it seemed like he would remain a lawyer for the rest of his life, his father told him he would support him no matter what he did. 

“Law was not my first choice, to be very honest. I graduated from St Stephen’s College in Economics and Mathematics. And, after I completed my BA, my first choice was actually to pursue a Post-Graduation in Economics at the Delhi School of Economics. But, as destiny would have it, I joined the law faculty and then there was no going back. My father, of course, was a very important source of influence on my life, not just in terms of the law, but in terms of learning basic values, the ethical values, which are associated with life. That generation of judges and lawyers was very strong in their foundational principles,” the former Chief Justice said. 

Stressing that his father made time for his family and never imposed his view on them, Justice Chandrachud said he also left it up to him to choose his career path. In their later years, he said, his father was more of a friend to him, and that friendship continued till the end. 

“And when the call of higher judicial office came to me – I was asked to become a judge when I was just 38 years old – and my appointment was not coming through for two years, I thought, well, it’s time to get on with the law and be a lawyer for the rest of my life. And when I looked at him (my father) for advice, he said, do as you please, and I’ll support you in whatever you do. Perhaps, he said, you will do equally satisfying work and fulfilling law work as a lawyer at the bar,” Justice Chandrachud said.

The former Chief Justice also said he had the good fortune of belonging to a generation when some of the “greats of the bar” were still active. He said he learnt immensely from Fali Nariman, Soli Sorabjee and K Parasaran. He also praised former Solicitor General KK Venugopal, calling him “extraordinarily brilliant” in both commercial and constitutional cases. 

First Fee After Harvard

Justice Chandrachud said he learnt a policy oriented approach to law at Harvard Law School and also got educated in policy as a student of Economics at Delhi University and at the Campus Law Centre in Delhi. Professor Lotika Sarkar, he said, gave students like him the “first groundings” in feminist jurisprudence when people were not talking about feminism in law in the 1980s.

The Harvard Law degree did not, however, have much of an impact immediately after he returned to practice. 

“I realised this to my disappointment when I got my first brief as a young lawyer in the Bombay High Court. I had an SJD from Harvard Law School, which is a Doctorate in Juridical Science, and my first brief was a little docket to mention before a division bench of the Bombay High Court. I asked the solicitor: ‘How much do I mark on the docket, what is my fee?'” he recounted. 

“Fees in Bombay in those days were marked in GMs, which is gold mohurs, and one GM was 15 rupees. So the solicitor looked at me and said, ‘You know, for this particular work, the ordinary fee would be five GMs, which would be 75 rupees. But since you are first appearing before the high court, I will give you six guineas for this case.’ So I realised that, notwithstanding a Harvard PhD, what I could mark in those days was about 75 rupees or 90 rupees in the mid-eighties,” he said. 

“So, life teaches you so many good lessons, you know? And you realise that a good academic degree is important, but it is not everything in itself when you actually join the profession. But Harvard benefited me as time went on… When I became a judge and started writing about the law and not just speaking about the law, I realised what an imperceptible impact Harvard had on my way of thought as an individual. So a lot of things are not so perceptible when you first join the profession, but the impact of what you’ve learned emerges later on in life,” he added. 

Electoral Bonds

The former Chief Justice said that when he was a judge at the High Court, there was comfort in knowing that there was a higher court that could correct any inadvertent errors. That was not the case with the Supreme Court and that was one of the reasons why no case in the top court was ever easy.

“Because when the Supreme Court speaks, it speaks for the present, and it speaks for the future,” he said.

Elaborating on one of his most important judgments, the scrapping of electoral bonds as a method of political funding, Justice Chandrachud said a judge is aware of the ramifications of the judgment but applies intellectual rigour and the basic principles of law to arrive at a verdict. 

“For instance, when you decide a case like the electoral bonds case, when it opens, you are conscious of the ramifications of what you are deciding and you are conscious of the impact which the case will have on the polity in the long run – it is obviously something which is present to the mind of the court. But when you are deciding the case in terms of intellectual rigour, you are applying the basic principles which are associated with that body of law. So, in the electoral bonds case, we were applying fundamental principles of manifest arbitrariness or the need for transparency in electoral funding,” he explained. 

These principles, he pointed out, have been developed over decades and judges are conscious that what they are deciding now will impact society in the future. 

“And that constantly reminds you, as a judge, to be humble. Humility is something you learn as a judge of the Supreme Court because you are conscious of the fact that the field of knowledge is so vast, and it’s far vaster than any of us as judges or lawyers can fathom,” Justice Chandrachud noted.

The former Chief Justice also highlighted how judging can be a very lonely task. 

“When arguments close, that’s the time for reflection for a judge. When a case is concluded in terms of arguments and you reserve a case for judgment, that’s when the real process of judging starts because then you are just left to yourself. There is no one else with you but your papers. And, in our case now, this is a digital format, so the digitised files and yourself. So, in that sense, judging itself is a very lonely task,” he said. 

Overturning Father’s Judgments

To a question on a former top court judge saying that the Supreme Court is “supreme but not infallible”, the former chief justice summed up his thoughts succinctly, saying: “The Supreme Court is final not because it is right, but it is right because it is final.”

This, he explained, was the reason why some past judgments of the Supreme Court were relooked at and overruled, including in 2024, when he retired as the Chief Justice. The former judge said this did not necessarily mean that the judgments were wrong – they may have been right in their context but may not make sense in today’s society. It was this, he said, that led to him overruling two judgments delivered by his father.

“For instance, you know, there was a judgment of Justice Krishna Iyer on property, which we recently had a look at again. The Supreme Court had said that because the individual is a member of the community, every property which belongs to the individual is property of the community in the context of Article 39 (b) and (c).  Now, this judgment was delivered in the context of the society when it was delivered – a very tightly regulated economy, central planning. All that changed after 1990, when the market reforms took place,” Justice Chandrachud said. 

He continued: “Between 1990 and 2024, India has evolved as a society, as an economy. So,  intrinsic to the work of the Supreme Court is the ability to relook at the judgments of the past. And, in that process, I overruled a couple of judgments delivered by my own father. But that’s part of the judicial process. Incidentally, they happen to be judgments of my father, but I would have done that anyway as part of our constitutional duty.”

Emergency

Addressing remarks by a colleague that he had been unduly harsh to a former judge, the former Chief Justice explained that some of what was attributed to him was not in the judgment and could have been in a draft circulated to other judges. 

“Well, for one thing, some of the words which are attributed to me as having been actually said in the judgment are not in the judgment, for the reason that maybe those observations were there in a draft which was circulated to colleagues… And, in this case, after a very well-meaning colleague requested me to look at that particular observation, I deleted it from the judgment. But how you phrase the judgment is, again a perception of that individual. And I don’t believe that to say that a judgment is ‘wrong’ or ‘terribly wrong’ is harsh,” he said. 

Pointing to the ADM Jabalpur case during the Emergency, which dealt with the suspension of rights – a judgment to which his father was a party – Justice Chandrachud said strong statements were made when it was overruled because the judges felt strongly about it. 

“We overruled that initially when we decided the Puttaswamy case where we decided the right to privacy. When we decided Puttaswamy, we said that the judgment was terribly wrong because the right to life and personal liberty does not originate in the Constitution. Even if there’s no Constitution, human beings in a civilised society, in a democratic society, have the right to life and personal liberty. The Constitution recognised the right to life and personal liberty, and, therefore, we overruled that judgment,” Justice Chandrachud said. 

“And, while we overruled it, we were also conscious as judges of the excesses which took place in the course of the internal Emergency which was declared in 1975, because those were the years when I was growing up. I had just entered college then and we were deeply conscious of what had happened. So when we responded to ADM Jabalpur and overruled it, we didn’t do so by saying very simple words that there was a constitutional error or there was a legal error. We were very, very strong about it because you feel strongly about an issue,” he said. 

Justice Chandrachud also pointed out that judges should be able to state how they feel about an issue. 

“I don’t think that there’s any harm in a judge giving vent to how strongly they feel about the issue, using parliamentary language… It’s not just youthful angst, I think (it is) constitutional angst because I just felt that we had to overrule the judgment,” he stressed. 

Social Media, Limited Attention Spans

When he was in office, Justice Chandrachud had spoken about the criticism of judges on social media and its use by vested interests.

Asked whether this kind of scrutiny made a judge’s job tougher, the former Chief Justice said, “Of course. Because, in the age of social media, everything that is said in court now becomes a part of a public dialogue…. Now every little word which is said by the court or by a judge in the course of an argument is on social media the next moment. The real challenge is that a lot of conversation which takes place in the court in the course of the hearing of a case does not reflect the final judgment. But, you know, our attention spans are so limited today – down to 20 seconds on social media – that people don’t understand the distinction between a dialogue in a court and the final judgment of the court.”

He also said the criticism is sometimes “extremely irrational” and without any basis in concrete material, but judges have to face the new normal.

“True To Conscience”

Justice Chandrachud said he spent several sleepless nights as a judge, thinking about judgments and dealing with administrative files. He shared that there is also a great deal of reflection and a judge always questions himself, even before delivering a judgment. 

To a question on senior lawyer and Congress leader Abhishek Manu Singhvi writing in a newspaper that Justice Chandrachud “was 90% right” and he should not be trolled, the former judge said what matters to him was that he had worked to the best of his ability. 

“I would think that it’s for others to judge my work. For me, what mattered was that I was true to my conscience and I did my work to the best of my ability. But it’s for others, today and tomorrow, to assess the work, to critique the work, and decide whether it has made a difference to society. For me, it was (about) if the individual cases which we decided made some difference to society –  whether it was, you know, having women in the armed forces. I just love it when I see a picture of a woman fighter pilot or a woman on the battlefront or women in warships. Because I realised that has been transformative to have women in the armed forces. So that’s the degree of personal fulfilment which you have as a judge,” he said. 

“And the future, always, will take its own call. Sometimes the present can be very complimentary, as Dr Singhvi was very graciously complimentary. Sometimes the present can be uncharitable as well to judges. But, I think, once you are away from the present zone of conflict and the polarity of views, the future decides on the contribution of a judge a little more objectively away from the zone of conflict and the conflict of ideologies,” he stressed. 

Judicial Evasion?

The former Chief Justice also spoke out strongly against charges of “judicial evasion”, saying the Supreme Court does not have full strength. The pressure of work, he said, is enormous and picking a particular case is always difficult because a Chief Justice has to balance constitutional issues and smaller cases that can have a big impact on individuals.

“It would be uncharitable to the Supreme Court to say it evades cases or it evades deciding cases. The court has 34 judges. Today, it’s not a court with full strength. Now there are about 80,000 cases which are pending. This is a great challenge for any head of the institution, which is that do you take up the smaller cases which involve a big impact on the lives of common citizens – maybe a civil appeal, a criminal appeal, a bail application, or do you take up, say, the seminal constitutional cases? Because when five or seven or nine judges are assigned by a chief justice to deal with a constitutional case, they are not dealing with the ordinary work of the court,” he pointed out.

“Now, some balance has to be drawn by the head of the institution on how many judges would you devote to doing the normal or routine work of the court, which is important in itself because you are dealing with the lives of individual citizens. But, equally, this is not just a court of appeal, it is a constitutional court, and you have to devote sufficient resources and human manpower to dealing with the important constitutional cases as well,” he explained.

Justice Chandrachud said that, in 2024, close to 60,000 cases were filed in the Supreme Court – the highest since Independence – and over 59,000 cases were disposed of despite Constitution benches growing. 

“So many of these Constitution bench cases that we decided were cases which were pending for a long, long time in the Supreme Court. And, obviously, you can’t deal with all of them, but I tried to deal with as many as I could. But I don’t think it is really a matter of judicial evasion when a case cannot be taken up by, a court. Some of my predecessors, for instance, if they couldn’t take up a particular case, it was not an act of judicial evasion. It was just because of the pressure of work.”

“It’s only when you are the Chief Justice of India and a judge of the Supreme Court that you realise the enormous pressure of work, just the volume of work – pressure in the sense of the volume of work which you have to handle. So this is a big challenge of how do you balance the two,” he said.

Justice Chandrachud also stressed that the Supreme Court works even during vacations. “I know as a matter of fact that the first victim of a life on the bench is your own ability to spend time with your family. So, I am making up for lost ground now.”