The Standards Of Basic Structure: Questioning The Master Of The Roster

The Master of the Roster system has been followed as an administrative convention in the Supreme Court of India from time immemorial. It was regarded as an efficient tool of administration and allocation of cases to benches in the Supreme Court. Is it all this and more or less benign? ASHIT KUMAR SRIVASTAVA AND SHAILESHWAR YADAV test the practice against the constitutional norms. 

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The memory of four senior judges holding a press conference against erstwhile Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra is still fresh in the minds of the legal community. It cannot be denied that scholars at the bar and in academia have expressed distaste for the prerogative of the Master of the Roster or MoR mechanism. The primary disagreement is based on the argument that it excessively empowers the individual who happens to be the CJI at any point to constitute benches and allocate cases.

Yet, the Supreme Court has time and again expressed faith in this prerogative of the CJI, arguing that the MoR system is necessary for judicial discipline. In Shanti Bhushan v. Union of India, the senior counsel asked the bench why the MoR system should not be replaced with a judicial collegium that allocates judges to benches and matters. The Supreme Court emphatically held that a collegium cannot be read into Article 145(2) of the Constitution.

However, in the absence of judicial checks, the MoR system remains pretty much unaccountable to any authority. This may create a breeding ground for arbitrariness. Time and again, legal scholars, including senior judges, have protested this prerogative of the CJI through the MoR. A repetition of benches and lowering of the frequency of dissenting opinions is one prime reason why academicians have questioned this prerogative.