SC flags growing trend of overturning own rulings

The Supreme Court on Wednesday warned that a "growing trend" of reopening and overturning its own verdicts before differently constituted benches threatens to "undermine" the authority and credibility of the apex court, besides weakening the constitutional mandate of finality of its rulings.

- Utkarsh Anand

The bench said the legitimacy of judicial power rests less on perfect correctness and more on certainty.

Sounding the alarm amid recent high-profile reversals, a bench of justices Dipankar Datta and AG Masih, cautioned that the practice of litigants attempting to secure a fresh outcome merely because of a change in bench composition risks undermining consistency and stability in the law, which are values central to the functioning of the Supreme Court.

The bench lamented that in the recent past, "we have rather painfully observed a growing trend in this Court (of which we too are an indispensable part) of verdicts pronounced by Judges, whether still in office or not and irrespective of the time lapse since pronounced, being overturned by succeeding benches or specially constituted benches at the behest of some party aggrieved by the verdicts prior in point of time."

"The prospect of opening up a further round of challenge before a succeeding bench, hoping that a change in composition will yield a different outcome, would undermine this Court's authority and the value of its pronouncements," said the bench, calling the trend a threat to the very idea of finality in judicial decision-making.

Emphasising the foundational importance of finality to the rule of law, the judgment invoked the famous words of US Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson : "We are not final because we are infallible, but we are infallible only because we are final."