Driving home this message with lucid explanations, abjuring use of harsh expressions, a bench of Justices D Y Chandrachud and A S Bopanna on Tuesday said use of complex and long sentences in judgments defeat the efficacy of justice delivery as they confuse litigants as to how and why a court rendered a particular decision.
The primary job of language is to communicate. It would be a form of goal dislocation if it is used to obfuscate. Judgments and orders often involve common people and they should be intelligible to them. The Supreme Court has made the right observation. But it also needs to create a mechanism to ensure that the remarks are translated into action down the line.
Times View:
Terming a judgment of a division bench of Himachal Pradesh HC “incomprehensible” and “difficult to navigate through” even for the Supreme Court judges who have spent more than two decades as constitutional court judges, the bench said, “A litigant for whom the judgment is primarily meant would be placed in an even more difficult position. Untrained in the law, the litigant is confronted with language which is not heard, written or spoken in contemporary expression.”
Writing the judgment, Justice Chandrachud said, “Language of the kind in a judgment defeats the purpose of judicial writing. Judgment writing of the genre before us in appeal detracts from the efficacy of the judicial process. The purpose of judicial writing is not to confuse or confound the reader behind the veneer of complex language.”
The bench said judgments have precedential value and are not meant only for judges or lawyers.
Another important aspect of judgment writing — brevity — has become a casualty in the age of cut-paste-copy convenience provided by computer software, lamented a tech-savvy Justice Chandrahcud, who conducts paperless proceedings using soft copies of case files.
While laying down broad guidelines for judgment writing, the bench said it is not its intention to kill the flair and style of writing judgments, unique to each judge’s way of expressing his mind.