Author: Arun Shourie
Publisher: Rupa
Year: 2001
Language: English
Pages: 454
ISBN/UPC (if available): 8171675573
Description
In this Powerful and thought-provoking book Arun Shourie examines the premises, prerequisites and consequences related to Courts in India and their judgments.
While examining the premises, prerequisites and consequences of Courts and their judgments, Arun Shourie raises some pertinent queries; Do judges merely enforce and interpret the law? Have they stretched the law and constitution too far? What are the prerequisites that judges need to ensure before they take on the work?
How is that in one judgment a court declares that it is the right of ministers to decide how far and in what direction a criminal investigation shall be carried, and in another the same court and indeed the same judge decides to as good as monitor an investigation?
What happens when a weak political class throws away an instrument the country desperately needs for combating terrorism?
How the court acquiesces so easily when the electoral law is overturned, when it is blatantly overturned to protect a person convicted of malpractices?
What happens to the economy when the interest alone on a project between the stay granted by the court and its final judgment costs government Rs. 3900 crore?
Why is it that the institutions that are set up to do what the courts are routinely unable to do, soon end up being just the clones of the courts they were intended to substitute?
This book by Shourie provides searing answers, evidence, dissection of judgments on these and other related issues.
A must for our times, a must for strengthening India.
Contents
THE SETTING
1. An Annual Lecture
2. Our Protectors
BRINGING ABOUT A CHANGE
3. When an institution Takes on the Works of Others
SPREDING OUT
4. The "State of India"
5. A Meta-consequence
6. From "Life" to "Life with Dignity" to the Pay of Imams
SOME CONSEQUENCES
7. "The Resultant Legal Chaos"
8. The Cascading Effect
TIME AND PLACE
9. Going Alone
10. Shutting Ones Eyes
11. Some Rules of Thumb
12. Alert Enough to get what we need
THE GOVERNMENT AS A LITIGANT
13. Some Ways to Discipline Staff
14. The Fate of Remedies
15. "Before Parting, we place on Records Our Deep Anguish"
THE STANDARDS WE NEED, THE ONES BY WHICH WE ARE JUDGED
16. Activism, an its Prerequisites
17. A Premise We Cannot Afford
18. We Can't Save the Country on a Part-Time Basis
INDICES
19. Cases Cited
20. Index