Law & Constitution

India's collegium system, under which senior judges effectively select their own successors, has no explicit basis in the Constitution's text and emerged instead through a sequence of Supreme Court judgments in the 1990s. The 2015 NJAC ruling struck down Parliament's near-unanimous attempt to replace it, reviving a standoff over judicial appointments that neither the executive nor the judiciary has been able to resolve since. This piece traces how the system evolved and why neither pure judicial self-selection nor pure executive control commands broad legitimacy.

Constitutional morality has become one of the Supreme Court's favourite phrases, cited in judgments from Section 377 to Sabarimala, but the concept is frequently used as a rhetorical flourish rather than engaged with as Ambedkar actually framed it. His 1948 Constituent Assembly speech, borrowing from the classicist George Grote, argued that constitutional morality must be deliberately cultivated in a society unused to democratic government, not simply assumed to already exist. This piece returns to that speech to ask what the phrase demands of institutions today.

India's Constitution is unusual among modern democracies in explicitly permitting preventive detention, allowing the state to imprison a person without trial on the anticipation that they might commit an offence. This provision, defended by the framers as a temporary necessity, has instead operated continuously since 1950 through a succession of statutes and remains in active use in several states today. This piece traces that continuity from the Preventive Detention Act to the National Security Act and current state-level laws.