Earlier this month, former Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra was in the news. The Supreme Court of Singapore upheld the setting aside of an arbitral award passed by a tribunal led by Justice Misra. The Singapore Court justified its decision on the ground that close to 50% of the arbitral award had been copied verbatim from two prior awards authored by Justice Misra, creating a strong presumption of prejudgment by the tribunal.
While the judgment was widely covered in the media, the larger question of copy-pasting in judgments ('the Ctrl+C problem’) and its roots remained insufficiently discussed.
As I argue here, Justice Misra is not the first, and the ‘Ctrl+C problem’ frequently recurs in judgments authored by the Supreme Court of India. To borrow the words of Lord Macmillan, “every judgment has its own characteristics and its own standard of merit”. The purpose of this article is not to sit in judgment over the Supreme Court’s style by applying an arbitrary or elevated standard, but to highlight a phenomenon that often plagues judgment writing.
Chief Justice Cardozo, in his seminal essay Law and Literature, identified six types of judgments. The first five were: magisterial, sententious, conversational, refined and persuasive. The sixth, according to Cardozo, was “the tonsorial or agglutinative, so called from the shears and the paste post which are its implements and emblem”. In not-so-polite terms, Cardozo’s sixth category referred to judgments excessively patchworked from other sources - cut and copy-pasted. Judgments issued by the Indian Supreme Court often fall into this category.
In an earlier article, I had highlighted that many of the Court’s landmark decisions delivered in the year 2023, including those concerning appointments to the Election Commission (378 pages), the 102nd Amendment to the Constitution (568 pages), and the 103rd Amendment to the Constitution (399 pages), ran into several hundreds of pages. A key reason for this excessive length is the Court’s practice of verbatim reproduction of copious paragraphs from previous judgments and other scholarship. It is not uncommon for the Court to trace the development of law from its origins, sometimes reaching back beyond the colonial period, and quote extensively from judgments, reports and academic commentary. While some degree of elaboration may be necessary when adjudicating knotty or complex legal issues, this should not become a practice.
Let me offer an example from Justice Misra’s tenure itself. In 2017, Justice Misra (along with Justices AM Khanwilkar and DY Chandrachud) delivered the judgment in Shakti Vahini v. Union of India and issued guidelines to state governments regarding the rise in honour killings. While the outcome was welcome, the judgment again displayed the 'Ctrl+C problem’. Of the fifty-seven paragraphs in the judgment, sixteen were devoted to verbatim reproduction of earlier judgments and reports. The Court justified this by claiming that they highlighted the “distress with which the Court has perceived the honour crimes”. The judgment also mentioned the Code of Hammurabi, one of the earliest known legal codes (circa 1792–1750 BCE, in Akkadian script) and the Council of Europe Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence Against Women and Domestic Violence. Neither reference had any direct bearing on the case; and India is not even a signatory to the Convention. The judgment could have been more succinct and effective without the detours and excessive reproductions. Similar patterns are evident in Justice Misra’s other judgments - on the entry of women into Sabarimala temple, Section 377, criminal defamation, Delhi’s special status and more.
An unfortunate byproduct of the Ctrl+C phenomenon is the emergence of exceptionally long judgments. Lawyers in jest often ask one another whether they’ve read the judgment in Kesavananda Bharati—not as a test of legal acumen, but of endurance and the ability to sift through thousands of pages. Lengthy judgments demand more time to read, analyse and work out the law actually laid down. This burden is far greater for members of the public who lack legal training, to whom the law is made less accessible. Judges often veer into issues unrelated to the dispute at hand, making didactic observations on broader moral or sociological debates. These observations become clickbait and are circulated in the media, despite being obiter and having no connection to the dispute adjudicated by the Court. Engagement with these remarks contributes to a continuing cycle, resulting in more length and less clarity.
Complex cases may sometimes require longer judgments, especially when voluminous records or extensive precedents are involved. Yet, even in such instances, concise writing is possible. The UK Supreme Court provides an instructive example. Its judgment in the Miller case, which dealt with the legality of the Prime Minister’s advice to prorogue Parliament during the Brexit crisis, was arguably one of the most consequential rulings in recent British history. It was, however, just ninety-eight pages long.
The Indian Supreme Court itself has voiced concern over long and repetitive judgments. In State Bank of India v. Ajay Kumar Sood, Justice Chandrachud observed that the Court had become a victim of cut-copy-paste convenience, and urged judges to write decisions that are accessible and comprehensible. The Court even laid down broad guidelines for judgment writing, focused on structure and clarity. However, these guidelines did not address the issue of excessive length. In another decision, the Court cautioned against citing too many authorities on a single issue, noting that it created confusion rather than clarity. Yet, despite these recurrent warnings, no substantive change has followed.
Chief Justices have frequently spoken of making judgments more accessible, especially through translation. But a translation of a long and dense judgment is still long and dense, albeit in a different language. Accessibility is not merely a matter of language, but of length, structure and clarity. Courts across the world are debating how their decisions can better communicate the law, not just to lawyers, but to citizens globally. It is high time that the Supreme Court of India joins that conversation.
Swapnil Tripathi is an Advocate and a DPhil (in Law) Student, University of Oxford. He tweets at S_Tripathi07.