Who Authored the most Judgments?

In light of Justice Banumathi’s retirement this week on 19 July, we had taken a statistical look at the judgments authored by the female Supreme Court Justices. In this post, we extend a similar analysis to all the current sitting Supreme Court Judges.[1]

This analysis only gives us a preview of the judicial performance: it is in no way a definite and sole reflection of the same. For a more comprehensive understanding, one has to look at several other factors including other judicial/administrative functions performed by the judges. And such granular data is currently absent.

Tenure[2]

The average tenure of the current sitting Supreme Court Judges is 5.5 years. Among the current cohort, five Judges have the longest tenure of 8 years: Justices Chandrachud, Lalit, Ramana, Bobde and Surya Kant.

Judgments[3]

The total number of judgments authored by all 32 judges is 3120. By taking a cursory look, J. Banumathi, in her six-year tenure, has authored the most judgments: 386. However, a more useful metric for analysis is to look at the Rate of the Judgments Authored per year. As all the judges have different years of appointment and have spent varied years at the Court.

To calculate this, we have not have taken into account the Tenure of the judges – as most of them still have many years before their retirement. Instead, we generated another field, Term.[4] So, we calculated the Rate of Judgments Authored per year by dividing the total number of judgments authored by a judge by their Term.

When we analyse the Rate, J. Chandrachud tops the list with 74.5. J. Banumathi is not long behind, she has the second-highest Rate with 64.33.

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[1] This post is based on data as reflected on 16 July 2020.

[2] Tenure = Year of Retirement – Year of Appointment

[3] We rely on Manupatra’s Advance Judge Analytics to source the data.

[4] Term = 2020 – Year of Appointment