Justice S.K. Kaul: Tenure in Numbers

Justice S.K. Kaul, who ranked second in seniority amongst the sitting judges of the Supreme Court, retired on 25 December 2023. Justice Sanjay Kishan Kaul served a tenure of 6 years and 10 months. In this period, he was a part of 590 benches, out of which he authored judgements in 167 cases.

With his retirement, the strength of the Supreme Court reduced to 33—one judge short of the sanctioned strength of 34. Exactly a month after Justice Kaul’s retirement, Justice P.B Varale took oath as a judge in the top court. 

Expected Tenure

Justice Kaul completed a tenure of 6.75 years—above the average tenure of Supreme Court judges, at 5.4 years. Currently, Chief Justice D.Y. Chandrachud has the highest expected tenure of 8.5 years, followed by Justice J.B. Pardiwala who has an expected tenure of 8.25 years.

Figure 1 shows the expected tenure of the sitting judges of the Supreme Court. The y-axis plots all the sitting judges of the Supreme Court and the x-axis plots the tenure in years.

Number of judgements authored

Figure 2 depicts the total number of judgements authored by the sitting judges of the Supreme Court. The dark blue bars represent the total number of judgements authored in their career at the Supreme Court. The yellow bars depict the judgements authored each year. The average is calculated by dividing the total number of judgements by the current tenure of the judges. 

During his tenure, Justice S.K. Kaul authored a total of 167 judgements at an average of 24.7 judgments per year. In terms of the total number of judgements authored, Justice Kaul is second only to CJI Chandrachud, who leads the list with a total of 585 judgements and an average of 68.8 judgements per year.

Rate of judgement authorship

In figure 3, the x-axis plots the years and the y-axis plots three values: number of judgements authored (marked in orange); number of benches (marked in yellow); and the rate of authorship (marked in blue). The rate of authorship shows the number of judgements Justice Kaul has written out of the number of benches he was a part of each year. 

Justice Kaul authored judgements in 29% of the total benches he was a part of in his career. 

At the start of his tenure in 2017, Justice Kaul was a part of 96 benches and wrote judgements for 16 of them. In 2018, Justice Kaul was a part of 132 benches, the highest in his tenure at the Supreme Court. Interestingly, his authorship rate was the lowest that year at 13.6%. 

2021 saw the highest output in bare numbers from Justice Kaul, with 37 judgements. But this only amounted to 40% of the benches he was on that year. In 2020, however, he had written judgements for 50.9% of the benches he was a part of.

There appears to be a cursory correlation between the number of benches and the rate of authorship. The rate of authorship seems to decrease with the increase in the number of benches. Justice Kaul’s rate of authorship was the highest in the years 2020 (at 50.9%) and 2023 (at 40.3%) when he was a part of only 53 and 52 benches. These are the lowest number of benches he has been a part of in his Supreme Court career. Likewise, we may note that Justice Kaul’s lowest authorship rate (at 13.6%) was in 2018 which saw him sitting 132 benches—the highest in his tenure.

Subject-matter of judgements

In Figure 4 we see that a majority of Justice Kaul’s judgements are in service matters (32), closely followed by criminal matters (29). He also authored judgements in Civil (22), Motor Vehicles (17), Property (12), Family (10), Insurance (9), and Constitution (8) matters.