Who has the authority to relocate a High Court? A constitutional question arising from the Gauhati High Court

High Courts in India are constitutional courts whose existence, jurisdiction and territorial structure are determined by the Constitution and effectuated through statutes enacted by parliament. Their creation and continuity are not matters of administrative arrangement, but of legislative design grounded in constitutional text and parliamentary enactment.

Despite this, public discussion around proposals to relocate High Courts often proceeds without addressing the underlying constitutional framework that governs such decisions. The focus tends to remain on questions of space, infrastructure or future expansion. While these considerations may be relevant at a planning level, they do not answer a more basic question: what is the lawful process by which the location of a High Court can be altered?

The Constitution envisages High Courts under Article 214, but the details of their territorial arrangement, including their principal seats, have historically been fixed through parliamentary legislation. Reorganisation Acts, establishment statutes and subsequent amendments have consistently treated the location of High Courts as a matter requiring legislative authority. This reflects a broader constitutional principle: structural features of courts are determined by law, not by administrative discretion.

This distinction becomes important when proposals are made to shift a High Court from its established principal seat. Such a decision is not merely about physical relocation; it concerns the alteration of a court’s statutory identity, its accessibility to litigants and its role within a federal judicial structure. Whether such a change can be effected without legislative sanction is, therefore, a question that goes beyond any one State or High Court.

Recent public developments concerning the administrative proposal to relocate the Gauhati High Court have brought this issue into sharp focus. While the episode arises from a specific factual context, the legal questions it raises are of wider relevance. At its core lie constitutional inquiries that applies equally across jurisdictions: can the principal seat of a High Court be shifted without an act of Parliament. What limits does law place on administrative or institutional decision-making in this regard?

These questions are not abstract. They surface most sharply when institutional decisions begin to move faster than the law that governs them.

In recent months, the proposed relocation of the Gauhati High Court has emerged as a live case study in this tension. What initially appeared to be a discussion about infrastructure and expansion has revealed a deeper constitutional uncertainty: who possesses the authority to decide where a High Court is situated and through what process.

The Gauhati High Court is not an ordinary High Court. It is a multi-State constitutional institution whose principal seat was fixed by parliament through the North-Eastern Areas (Reorganisation) Act, 1971. That statute did not merely reorganise territories; it fixed the High Court’s principal seat at Guwahati, while separately providing for benches and additional places of sitting through a constitutionally defined mechanism.

This distinction is crucial. Indian constitutional law recognises a difference between where judges may sit and where a High Court is constituted to sit. The former allows administrative flexibility within statutory limits. The latter reflects legislative determination.

Yet, the recent proposal to shift the principal seat of the Gauhati High Court has proceeded without any corresponding parliamentary amendment to the governing statute. Public justification has relied on familiar grounds - space constraints, modern facilities and long-term planning. What has remained largely unaddressed is whether such considerations, however bona fide, can substitute the process mandated by the Constitution and parliament.

Indian constitutional practice has been consistent on one point: structural changes to constitutional courts are effected through legislation, not administrative resolution.

This is evident across jurisdictions. When High Courts have been created or reorganised - whether after the States Reorganisation Act, 1956, the Punjab Reorganisation Act, 1966 or the Andhra Pradesh Reorganisation Act, 2014, among others - Parliament has intervened to fix jurisdiction, territorial extent and the principal seat of the High Court. Where flexibility was intended, it was expressly provided for, usually in the form of statutory power to establish benches after consultation with constitutional authorities.

What parliament has not done is leave the relocation of a High Court’s principal seat to executive preference or internal institutional consensus. This is not an accidental omission. It reflects an understanding that the seat of a High Court is part of its constitutional identity, not a matter of administrative convenience.

The location of a High Court shapes access to justice in concrete ways -travel, cost, legal infrastructure and litigant participation. It affects not only lawyers and judges, but also the constitutional promise of equal access to courts. That is why parliament has historically treated such decisions as matters requiring legislative determination.

What gives the Gauhati episode particular constitutional significance is not merely the proposal itself, but the process by which it has been pursued.
The proposal elicited sustained institutional response from members of the Bar across the North-East, including protests and a referendum in which an overwhelming majority opposed the relocation. These responses are relevant not as expressions of popular will, but as indicators of procedural disquiet within the legal community. Importantly, they were not framed as resistance to a new High Court, improved infrastructure or judicial expansion. They were framed as objections to authority and procedure.

The consistent grievance articulated was that no legislative process had been initiated; no amendment to the 1971 Act had been proposed; and no parliamentary deliberation had preceded discussions about shifting the principal seat. The dissent, in other words, was constitutional in character. It questioned whether decisions affecting the very structure of a constitutional court could be contemplated through executive signalling or internal deliberation alone.

In this context, questions have also arisen regarding the scope of institutional authority within the High Court itself. A Full Court resolution is a recognised mechanism of judicial administration, enabling collective decision-making on matters of internal governance. Its authority, however, is confined to the administrative domain. It does not extend to altering the statutory features of the Court as constituted by parliament. Where the principal seat of a High Court has been fixed by legislation, that determination cannot be displaced through internal resolution, howsoever considered or unanimous. Such a change would require legislative intervention, not institutional administration.

Read in this light, references to protests or referenda do not perform an advocacy function. They serve instead to foreground a deeper constitutional concern - that decisions of structural consequence are being contemplated outside the processes prescribed by law.

Judicial intervention in a similar context reinforces these concerns. When proposals were made to relocate the principal seat of the Uttarakhand High Court, the Supreme Court stayed the High Court’s direction and issued notice, thereby ensuring that steps toward relocation were paused  while questions of authority and process remained unresolved.

The Court did not pronounce on the merits of relocation. Its focus, at that stage, was procedural and institutional: whether decisions that affect the seat of a constitutional court can be pursued through judicial or administrative mechanisms without clear statutory authorisation.

The Uttarakhand episode is, therefore, not a regional parallel, but a doctrinal confirmation. It underscores a settled principle: courts administer justice, but they do not redesign the statutory foundations of their own existence.

It would be analytically incomplete to treat the Gauhati High Court controversy as a localised institutional disagreement. What it raises is a national constitutional question concerning the limits of authority over constitutional courts.

If the principal seat of a High Court can be relocated through administrative action - whether by a State government or a Full Court resolution - then the line between legislative authority and institutional management begins to blur. Statutory safeguards become flexible in practice, even if rigid on paper.

Such a shift would have wide consequences. Access to justice, federal balance and institutional stability would all be affected. More fundamentally, it would invert a core constitutional sequence - placing convenience before legality.

The Constitution does not prohibit the relocation of a High Court’s principal seat. What it insists upon is method. High Courts are created, structured and territorially anchored by statute. Until parliament chooses to alter that statutory design, neither executive initiative nor institutional resolution can effect a change in a court’s legal identity.

The Gauhati High Court episode does not merely raise a regional controversy. It compels a return to first principles. In a constitutional system governed by law, change must travel through parliament. That discipline - rather than any particular outcome - is what preserves the integrity of India’s judicial architecture.

Sahil Hussain Choudhury is a lawyer and constitutional law researcher based in New Delhi.

Sayed Salim Ahmed is a practising advocate at the Gauhati High Court.