Petty of judges to avoid judicial precedents: SC

JUdges do non sit around to settle down scores and a vindictive stance is incompatible with their swearing to maintain the Constitution and the law, the Supreme Court underlined while emphasising that an attempt to avoid a binding precedent conveys a “measure of pettiness”, inconsistent with the detachment that judicial reasoning demands.“The gavel is an instrument of reason and not a weapon of reprisal… Judges across our country must remember that collegiality is the companion virtue of independence and that a reversal on appeal is not a personal affront but the ordinary operation of a constitutional hierarchy that corrects error and settles law. Respect for the senior jurisdiction is not subservience. It is an acknowledgment that all courts pursue a common enterprise to do justice according to law,” held a bench of justices Vikram Nath and PB Varale.A judgment, it said, that attempts to resist binding authority undermines the unity of law, burdens litigants with avoidable expense and delay, and invites the perception that outcomes depend on the identity of the judge.“In a constitutional judiciary, it is the law, as declared, that brings the conversation to a close. We restate the simple duty of courts: apply precedent as it stands and give effect to appellate directions as they are framed. In that discipline lies the confidence of litigants and the credibility of courts,” said the bench.The bench held that an attempt to avoid or dilute a binding ruling conveys a “measure of pettiness” incompatible with the detachment required of judges. “A judgment that attempts to resist binding authority undermines the unity of law, burdens litigants with avoidable expense and delay, and invites the perception that outcomes depend on the identity of the judge,” the court said.The remarks came while setting aside a 2018 judgment of the Bombay high court that had refused relief to landholders challenging annotations and mutation entries treating their properties as “private forests” deemed to have vested in the State under the Maharashtra Private Forests Acquisition Act (MPFA), 1975. The Supreme Court held that the high court’s ruling impermissibly attempted to distinguish the binding ratio of its earlier decision in Godrej and Boyce (2014) on immaterial grounds.Calling this departure “an unfortunate breach of stare decisis,” the bench reiterated that Article 141 of the Constitution makes the law declared by the Supreme Court binding on all courts, while Article 144 obliges all judicial and civil authorities to act in aid of the court. “These are not ceremonial recitals,” the bench wrote. “They are structural guarantees that convert dispersed adjudication into a single system that speaks with one voice.”The court said that for vesting under the MPFA to occur on the basis of an Indian Forest Act notice, the notice must not merely be issued but also served on the landholder so as to afford the right to object and trigger the statutory inquiry. In the present cases, there was no proof of service, no final notification, no taking of possession, and no compensation process, making the State’s claim of vesting unsustainable.The Supreme Court found that the high court had proceeded on assumptions unsupported by the record and had effectively revived reasoning earlier rejected. While clarifying that no motive was being attributed, the bench added that when a court “minimizes a binding ratio, ignores missing statutory steps, and seeks to distinguish on immaterial facts,” it creates the appearance of reluctance to apply settled law.Allowing the appeals, the bench quashed the high court judgment and all mutation entries treating the lands as private forests, and directed that revenue records be corrected accordingly.“In the discipline of applying precedent lies the confidence of litigants and the credibility of courts,” it concluded.