N.C. Aiyar
N.C. Aiyar
Former Judge of the Supreme Court of India
Assumed Office23rd Sep, 1950
Retired On11th May, 1956
Previously
Judge of the Madras High CourtJuly 1941 - January 1948
District and Sessions Judge, Madras1927
City Civil Judge1927
Profile
Early life and Education
Justice Nagapudi Chandrasekhara Aiyar was born on 25 January 1888 in present day Andhra Pradesh. His father was a lawyer and a Telugu and Sanskrit scholar.
By 1909, he had received his Law degree from Madras Law College.
Career as an advocate and a Judge
Justice Aiyar first entered the practice of law in 1910, plying his trade at the Madras High Court. After 17 years at the Bar, his first stint in the judiciary came in 1927 as a civil judge for the city of Madras. Later that year, he became a district and sessions judge and held posts across the Madras Presidency.
His career came full circle when he returned to the Madras High Court, first as an Additional Judge in 1941, and then on a permanent basis in 1944.
After retiring from the Madras High Court in 1948, Justice Aiyar represented India at the Indo-Pakistan Boundary Disputes Counsel. A year later, he accepted an appointment to the All-India Industrial (Bank Disputes) Tribunal.
In September 1950, the first judge to be appointed after the Constitution came into effect. Justices Aiyar and M. Patanjali Sastri, represented South India in the first cohort of judges at the Supreme Court.
Justice Aiyar’s tenure in numbers
Figure 1 indicates that Justice Aiyar has authored 46 judgements, and has been a part of 152 benches.
Figure 2 indicates that Justice Aiyer mainly authored judgements in Criminal Matters (14%). This is followed by Property (8%), Constitutional (6%), and Civil (5%) matters.
Notable Judgments
In 1952, Justice Aiyar wrote the majority opinion in D. N. Banerji v P. R. Mukherjee And Others, which dealt with the interpretation of the Industrial Disputes Act, 1947. Rather than using a strict interpretation of the law, Justice Aiyar expanded the scope of the Act, opting to to include disputes between workers and municipalities.
But in the same breath, Justice Aiyar was willing to decline interceding in cases where the Court’s discretion was not needed. In Veerappa Pillai v Raman & Raman Ltd, Justice Aiyar prevented a bus proprietor from appealing a traffic board’s decision to deny a permit to a High Court. Justice Aiyar found that the Motor Vehicles Act had a “complete and precise scheme” for the issue and denying of permits, which limited would-be litigants to the remedies within that statute.
Justice Aiyar was also willing to reign in the power of the High Courts. In 1951 in his D. Stephens v Nosibolla opinion, he spelled out the circumstances where a High Court could exercise its revisional jurisdiction—correcting a manifest illegality or a gross miscarriage of justice. He also stated that a High Court could not revise a judgment just because it disagreed with a lower court’s ruling. Justice Aiyar not only opined on issues of substantive law, but on issues of court procedure as well. In 1951, in Arjan Singh Alias Puran v Kartar Singh, he stated that an appellate court should generally not accept evidence outside of that heard during the trial. Additional evidence, he said, may be heard by the appellate court, when the evidence at trial is not enough for the Court to render a judgment.
Justice Aiyar’s 1951 opinion in Wilayat Khan v The State Of U.P. required appellate courts to grant great deference to the opinions reached by Trial Courts. reasoned that since appellate courts did not hear or observe witnesses personally, they could not independently weigh the evidence at trial.. ‘Compelling circumstances’ would be required to reverse acquittals, and not a mere possibility that a different conclusion could be reached based on the underlying facts.