CDS (I) 2023 General Knowledge · Question 28 of 120

Correct — A, Justice H. L. Dattu. The Supreme Court notified a special bench titled the Social Justice Bench in the first week of December 2014, and the Chief Justice who ordered it was H. L. Dattu. Its first composition was Justice Madan B. Lokur and Justice Uday U. Lalit, and it sat on Friday afternoons for a couple of hours. The reason for creating it was administrative rather than doctrinal: a large body of matters touching the poor — the release of undertrials, night shelters for the homeless, food-grain rotting in warehouses, children in institutions, the working of welfare legislation — had been pending for years without a fixed forum, and the idea was to give that class of case a bench of its own so it would be heard rather than pushed down the list. The date settles the answer on its own. Dattu was Chief Justice of India from 28 September 2014 to 2 December 2015, and he is the only one of the four judges named who was in office in December 2014.

• (b)Justice K. G. Balakrishnan — Balakrishnan was Chief Justice from January 2007 to May 2010, four years before the bench was set up. He is better remembered as the first Dalit Chief Justice of India and, afterwards, as Chairperson of the National Human Rights Commission.
• (c)Justice R. M. Lodha — Lodha held office from April to September 2014 — he is Dattu's immediate predecessor, which is what makes him the most tempting wrong answer. His tenure is associated with the case-management proposal for a court sitting through the year, not with this bench.
• (d)Justice Y. K. Sabharwal — Sabharwal was Chief Justice from November 2005 to January 2007, well before the bench existed.

The Supreme Court's work is distributed by the Chief Justice, who is master of the roster: he decides which judges sit in which combination and what categories of case come before them. A special bench is one such allocation — a bench constituted for a defined class of matters. The Social Justice Bench of December 2014 was an early and much-noticed example, created to concentrate long-pending welfare and public-interest matters before two judges on a fixed day.

Questions naming a Chief Justice are almost always solvable as a dating problem rather than a memory problem. Fix the event in time, then ask who held office then. Here the event is December 2014, and the four tenures are far enough apart that only one candidate survives: Sabharwal to January 2007, Balakrishnan to May 2010, Lodha to September 2014, Dattu from 28 September 2014. Lodha is the designed trap because he left office ten weeks before the notification. It is also worth carrying the honest verdict on the bench itself — commentators reviewing it after its first year found that it had disposed of very little, and the arrangement did not survive as a permanent feature of the Court.

• The Social Justice Bench was notified in the first week of December 2014 and first comprised Justices Madan B. Lokur and Uday U. Lalit.
• H. L. Dattu was the 42nd Chief Justice of India, sworn in on 28 September 2014 and retiring on 2 December 2015.
• The bench was to take up long-pending matters concerning the poor and the marginalised, sitting on Friday afternoons.
• R. M. Lodha was Chief Justice from 27 April to 27 September 2014, immediately before Dattu.
• The Chief Justice of India is master of the roster, and constituting a special bench is an exercise of that administrative power rather than of judicial power.

• Picking the immediate predecessor because the event feels earlier than it was; Lodha left office in September 2014 and the bench came in December.
• Assuming a special bench is created by statute or by the full Court; it is an administrative act of the Chief Justice.
• Treating the Social Justice Bench as a permanent institution of the Court, which it did not become.

Usually as a who-was-Chief-Justice-when item attached to a landmark or an administrative innovation, and occasionally as a match between a Chief Justice and the reform associated with him.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The power to constitute benches and allocate cases in the Supreme Court of India rests with which one of the following?

  • (a)The senior-most puisne judge
  • (b)The Chief Justice of India
  • (c)The Union Minister of Law and Justice
  • (d)The Registrar General of the Supreme Court

  Answer(b) The Chief Justice of India — as master of the roster, an administrative power the Court has repeatedly affirmed.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Justice H. L. Dattu, who ordered the constitution of the Social Justice Bench, later headed which one of the following bodies?

  • (a)Law Commission of India
  • (b)National Human Rights Commission
  • (c)Election Commission of India
  • (d)Union Public Service Commission

  Answer(b) National Human Rights Commission — a chairpersonship that by law goes to a former Chief Justice of India or a former judge of the Supreme Court.