Turns out that two thirds of Americans cannot name even one Supreme Court justice. Their knowledge of the law, too, leaves much to be desired.
For example, a 2006 survey found that only 28% of Americans can name two or more First Amendment rights; on the plus side, the same study found that 52% can name two or more characters on the Simpsons.
I strongly suspect that much the same can be said for India (not the Simpsons part), with the difference that the ratio here would be much higher than two thirds. Aside from members of the legal community and a handful of political science and policy wonks (many of these are bloggers) the average Indian knows – at best the name of the Chief Justice of India, and this only because of the many symposiums and colloquims he participates in. Recently, of course, some judges have recieved considerable media attention – Dinakaran is the name that readily springs to mind – and I would expect your average Indian newspaper reader to be familiar with Kapadia and G. S. Mishra as well.
Much of this ignorance owes to the way the public views court decisions as having come from “the Court” rather than from the pen of a single Judge. Newspaper reporting styles are largely responsible for this; it would be welcome to see a shift in emphasis towards individual judges instead of attributing decisions to a faceless ‘SC’ . I think this is important because judges have radically different ideological viewpoints, and while experienced advocates take advantage of their characteristics to go forum-shopping, the ordinary public gets frustrated and cynical about ideas of justice and freedom that seem entirely contradictory. Instead of the grand, impartial and objective arbiter of justice it wants to appear as, the Supreme Court – much like any other Court – is composed of a body of real people with trends and prejudices, all vying to establish, by means of the system we call the majority judgement, their own conceptions of justice. So while India does not have the same executive-tilted judicial nomination policy as to make it mandatory to observe the credentials of judges and appointed justices, it is still the ground for several battles that are more ideological and theoretical than legal – and to this extent needs its authors to not act behind the scenes and anonymously.
No related posts.
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
Facebook comments:
Powered by Facebook Comments