Skewed Scales of Justice: Labor Disputes in the Supreme Court of India

• In Event: Political Institutions in the Developing World

Abstract

The Indian Supreme Court is one of the most powerful courts in the world. Appointments to this court are free from executive influence. Yet, a systematic study of this institution is missing. Therefore, I undertake a rigorous exercise that measures ideological orientation of the judges on politically salient issues. I use an original data set on all labor law related judicial rulings spanning 24 years (1996-2020), and leverage the randomized computer allocation of cases to 2-judge panels to develop a novel estimation approach that captures the orientation of judges on the traditional left-right dimension. I find that judges in the Indian Supreme Court favor capital – in disputes between labor and capital. This effect is magnified whenever the right-wing party is in power in the federal government – an unintended consequence given that appointments to the judiciary are “apolitical”. On the mechanism front, I undertake a comprehensive data collection exercise and track career biographies of all the judges in the court, and supplement it with qualitative evidence (interviews with civil society, law scholars and judges) about career trajectories, informal networks, and judicial communities. I find that the right-wing bias in the court is driven by those judges who were elite legal professionals before becoming judges and represented various state and federal governments as lawyers. These results highlight the unintended effects of complete separation of the judicial appointment procedure from the political process. Finally, by tracking career biographies, the paper pinpoints the formation of judicial worldview to the individual judges’ careers before securing judgeship. This paper is one of the first quantitative studies on judicial behavior in the Indian court and contributes to the literature on comparative judicial politics, comparative political institutions, political methodology, and political economy of development.

Author

• Varun Karekurve-Ramachandra, University of Southern California Univeristy