The Verdictum: Justice C Nagappan

Justice Chockalingam Nagappan was elevated as a judge of the Supreme Court on July 19, 2013. During a tenure that lasted 1172 days, Justice Nagappan made 325 rulings that were reported, before retiring on October 3 this year..Justice Nagappan was a junior under veteran lawyer and former Attorney General of India K Parasaran. After a stint as a part-time lecturer at Madras Law College, he was recruited as a District and Sessions judge in 1987. Ultimately, he would be sworn in as a permanent judge of the Madras High Court in September 2002. He also served as Chief Justice of the Orissa High Court in 2013, before being elevated to the apex court..In the farewell function organised by the Supreme Court Bar Association last month, Justice Nagappan said,.“The success of a judge depends on co-operation and assistance by the Bar.”.Month-wise distribution of rulings.Before going into the quantitative analysis of Justice Nagappan’s rulings, it must be noted that the Supreme Court of India website has considered 136 orders pertaining to the same case separately. The orders relate to land acquisition matters concerning the Delhi Development Authority, in which there were more than one hundred respondents. Though every case was decided on the basis of a single order, they are still listed as separate orders..Needless to say, this fact renders some of his numbers askew. It also points out the arbitrary manner in which the Supreme Court registry classifies cases which are related to one another. Another possibility is that the Supreme Court website had erroneously considered these cases separately..Disregarding the month of August (since the 136 orders were passed on the same day in August this year), Justice Nagappan’s productivity was generally higher during the last half of the year; his most productive months were September and November, with 28 and 21 rulings respectively. The least respective months were May and January, with 10 and 12 rulings respectively..Day-wise productivity.Apart from the blip in August, Justice Nagappan daily productivity hovered around 0.2 rulings per day..Year-wise productivity.Justice Nagappan passed more rulings in his penultimate year as an apex court judge than any other year. Without the 136 orders in August 2016, he only passed 25 reported rulings during the year in which he retired..YearNo. of rulings2013102014742015802016161.Bench-wise distribution of rulings.The aforementioned 136 rulings were made sitting with Justice Kurian Joseph, a judge with whom he had not sat separately with otherwise. Apart from Justice Joseph, he sat with Justice Gopala Gowda – who retired soon after him – 55 times. He also sat with Justice MY Eqbal 36 times and with Chief Justice of India TS Thakur 34 times. He was part of a three-judge bench 21 times..Case-type distribution of rulings.Most of the matters disposed of by Justice Nagappan (257 of them) were civil appeals. His education in criminal law (he holds an M.L. in the subject) would have come in handy when he disposed of 48 criminal appeals..Notable judgments.Justice Nagappan was part of the bench that upheld the Kerala High Court’s conviction of CPI (M) leader MV Jayarajan for making derogatory remarks against members of the judiciary..In May 2015, he was part of the bench that decided the fate of the defamation case filed against Rajdeep Sardesai and other journalists for alleged false reporting in the Sohrabuddin encounter case. That bench upheld the AP High Court’s decision to not quash the criminal proceedings initiated against the journalist. The matter is still pending..In the challenge to the Centre’s Aadhaar scheme, he was part of the three-judge bench that came to the conclusion that the matter should be referred to a larger bench, since it involved questions of constitutional importance..In December 2015, he was part of the bench that directed all States and Union Territories to include acid attack victims in the disability list..In RBI v. JN Mistry, he was part of the bench that came down heavily on the Reserve Bank of India, holding that the banking regulator was duty-bound to disclose information regarding public sector banks. The RBI’s argument that the information was held in a fiduciary capacity and hence was exempt under the RTI Act was deemed “absurd”.