In a public interest petition before the Madras High Court submitted earlier this year, an advocate said the court logged 155 days of holidays in a year. The holidays included the month-long summer break, half a month for the Hindu festival Dussehra, a week-long vacation for Christmas, as well as several other public holidays and time off during strikes. The petitioner said this amounted to a violation of a citizen’s fundamental right of access to justice under the Constitution of India. The court hasn’t yet set a date for hearing the petition. In India, high courts are required to work for 210 days a year and the Supreme Court for 185 days. In a 2009 report, the Law Commission of India recommended reducing court vacations for the higher judiciary by 10-15 days and increasing working hours by half an hour a day. The recommendation was made because of the growing backlog of cases. Unsurprisingly, the legal fraternity doesn’t want to see its vacation time curtailed. A typical working day for a judge involves six to seven hours in court for a hearing or trial and many hours more spent reading files and writing judgments. India has just 13 judges for every one million people, compared to 35-40 in some developing nations and 50 on average in developed countries, according to a May report by a parliamentary committee. The riposte to this argument is that judges and lawyers could rotate their leave, thereby ensuring that courts don’t have to shut down for a month or more over summer. This seems rational but it would be like snatching chocolates away from the kid used to having them every day. Courts and the judiciary are steeped in tradition and any attempt to change will be met with protest. A global comparison doesn’t augur well for the anti-vacation voices either. In the U.K., court of appeal and high court judges are expected to devote themselves to judicial business only for the legal year, which usually amounts to 185-190 days [ ] with a two-month break in August-September. The U.S. Supreme Court doesn’t have a term break, but judges can take leave any time and the court only deals with about 10,000 cases a year.
Posted on: Thu, 04 Jul 2013 22:46:54 +0000
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