The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Chennai News : We are not super-legislature: High Court

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Tuesday, Jun 28, 2005

Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu - Chennai

We are not super-legislature: High Court

A. Subramani

Markandey Katju

CHENNAI: : The judiciary must exercise self-restraint and avoid the temptation to act as a super-legislature, the Madras High Court said.

"By exercising self-restraint, the court will only enhance its own respect and prestige."

Rejecting the plea to read down or change the language of the MCI Regulations, the First Bench of Chief Justice Markandey Katju and Justice F.M. Ibrahim Kalifulla, hearing a batch of writ petitions against the new admission policy, said: "The plain and literal reading of the regulations can lead to only one interpretation; if there is more than one examining body in the State, an entrance test is mandatory. We cannot do violence to the plain and clear language used in the regulations."

The legislature, the executive and the judiciary should not encroach upon the domain of one another, it said.

Need for self-restraint

"It is only the judiciary which has the right to determine the limits of jurisdiction of all these three organs. This great power must, therefore, be exercised by the judiciary with utmost humility and self-restraint."

The judges said the "constitutional trade-off" for independence was that judges must restrain themselves from the areas reserved for other branches.

Quoting from the history of the U.S. Supreme Court, the judges said if the judiciary over-reached its limits, "there is bound to be a reaction from politicians and others.

The politicians will then step in and curtail the powers, or even the independence of the judiciary."

Activism

The judges, however, hastened to add that it was not their opinion that the judge should never be "activist."

Activism should be resorted to in exceptional circumstances when the situation demanded it in the interest of the nation.

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