My Years in the Supreme Court continues...

The Federal Court had no power to entertain certain types of appeals unless the High Court concerned certified that the case was fit enough to be heard. This seemed in 1935 a salutary provision.

But when Sir Douglas Young refused to grant a certificate in a contempt of court case in which he himself was involved, legal circles had been perturbed. The Constitution now laid down that notwithstanding the refusal of such a certificate, the Supreme Court could grant special leave to appeal where it felt that justice demanded it. We were soon flooded with applications for special leave to appeal wherever a litigant could afford the high cost of such a proceeding in the Supreme Court. Some of these applications were so frivolous that I remember to have disposed of about a dozen of them at one sitting!

The right to grant special leave to appeal had been very widely phrased in the Constitution.

The Supreme Court could grant special leave to appeal from the decision of any court or tribunal in the territory of India. In March 1950 in the Bharat Bank vs. Employees of the Bharat Bank, the Advocate General argued before the
Court that where a statute vested in a tribunal the right to determine a case finally, the Supreme Court was debarred from entertaining an appeal against such a determination. Agreeing with Bakhshi Tek Chand’s able arguments at the Bar we unanimously held that the right and jurisdiction conferred on the Court by the Constitution could not be abridged by any statutory provision.

When the court was confronted with the same question again in the United Commercial Bank vs. Its Employees, it went further and held that the order passed by two members of the tribunal, when the tribunal consisted of three members, could not be sustained.

To be continued...