On 12 Jun 2009, at 07:07, Nikhil Mehra wrote:
How are cases allocated to judges? Shouldn't their knowledge of the
domain
play a role in their ability to determine how the law applies in a
given
case?
At the Supreme Court and High Court level, the allocation is decided
largely
by the Chief Justice of the court. In both instances there will be
certain
judges who will hear certain types of matters. For eg: If you file a
taxation matter before the Supreme Court, your matter is likeliest
to be
heard by either Justice Kapadia or Justice SB Sinha. Basically there
are
designated judges for specific kinds of matters, which will
generally be a
branch of law which they either practised with distinction as
lawyers, or
constituted their specialty as junior or district level judges. In any
event, there are tribunals for virtually every specialised law -
Income Tax,
Customs/Excise, Company affairs, consumer disputes, electricity
matters -
you name it, we've got it!
In other words, judges are allocated (generally) according to their
"vertical" domain knowledge of areas of law, not their "horizontal"
domain knowledge of things like technology, although sometimes the
lines can blur (for eg, there are specialized judges/courts in the
High Court in London for construction matters).
Badri
