Four senior Supreme Court judges have just accused the chief justice of India of misusing his prerogative as master of the roster. Unlike the US Supreme Court, where the nine justices hear every case together, the Indian Supreme Court has multiple benches of varying sizes, and the cases have to be distributed.


The CJI alone has the right to distribute the cases that come up before the court amongst panels of judges called benches. The burden of the letter written to the chief justice by the judges, Jasti Chelameswar, Madan B. Lokur, Ranjan Gogoi and Kurian Joseph, is that he has violated convention by allotting important cases to benches that would not by convention have been given them, benches that the letter describes as "of their preference". The letter suggests that cases of national importance have been selectively assigned without good reason to pliant benches.

Read Mukul Kesavan's piece here.