EVERY CONSTITUTIONAL COURT has its limits. It can decide only on what is placed before it. Judges do not go out looking for facts. They do not roam the public domain or piece together competing narratives on their own. They rely on what lawyers bring to the courtroom.
If that material is incomplete, selectively presented or framed in a way that leaves out inconvenient facts, even the most careful court can be led to a result it may not otherwise have reached. That is where the Supreme Court’s review jurisdiction becomes important.
The Supreme Court has never claimed to be infallible. Review exists because mistakes do happen. Sometimes an error is obvious on the face of the record. Sometimes a material fact was genuinely not known to the court, despite due diligence. At other times, the real impact of an order becomes clear only after it is implemented. Review, in that sense, is a limited but necessary corrective exercise.
At the same time, Supreme Court judgments are meant to bring finality. People plan their lives, governments frame policy and institutions take decisions on the assumption that the law has been settled. If every judgment were endlessly reopened, legal certainty would disappear. The court, therefore, has to strike a careful balance between correcting serious error and preserving finality.
This tension is felt most strongly in cases that have wide public consequences. A solution that appears narrow at first can end up having consequences far beyond what the bench may have anticipated.
In such cases, incomplete factual disclosure can be especially problematic. Sometimes, after an order is passed, media scrutiny and public debate bring to light facts that should ideally have been placed before the court earlier. When that happens, judges may reasonably feel that they did not have the full picture. And when the foundation is incomplete, course correction becomes unavoidable.
Problems arise when settled positions are unsettled without following the discipline laid down by the Constitution. If a two-judge bench has decided a matter and reconsideration becomes necessary, there are well-defined routes; review, reference to a larger bench or, in the rarest of cases, curative jurisdiction. When these paths are not followed carefully, uncertainty creeps in.
The recent debates around stray dog management orders show how this can happen. Parallel benches, looking at overlapping issues on partial records, can end up issuing directions that appear to pull in different directions. Often, the difficulty lies not in judicial inconsistency but in selective disclosure. Key data, previous proceedings or broader policy contexts are simply not placed before the court. The outcome, then, is confusion rather than clarity.
Judges are keenly aware of the pressures under which courts function. With thousands of cases listed every day, the process sometimes resembles a samudra manthan, where truth is expected to emerge from competing claims. But that process depends heavily on lawyers doing their duty. Full and fair disclosure is not a formality; it is central to justice. When it is lacking, the court’s task becomes infinitely harder.
Course correction, in the end, is not a sign of weakness. It is a recognition of reality. What matters is the willingness to acknowledge error and correct it, while still respecting the need for finality. In a constitutional system built on trust, that balance is not optional. It is essential.
Roy is a former justice of the Supreme Court.
As told to Kanu Sarda