Abstract
The Constitution of India under Article 142 grants the Supreme Court of India broad inherent powers to do complete justice. The contours of these inherent powers and what it means to achieve complete justice were left to the Supreme Court to determine on its own. In this paper, we empirically examine all the Supreme Court cases from its inception in 1950 till 2023 which use the term “Article 142” or “complete justice.” We found 1579 cases, which were then hand-coded for many variables such as the nature of the case, where the case was appealed from, the temporal distribution, the laws involved, the nature of the issue, the judges involved, among others. The paper examines when and how the Supreme Court wields its inherent powers, generating various insights and exploring trends which show visible patterns depending on the variables involved in the case
Recommended Citation
Mohan, M. P. Ram; Prasad, Sriram; Venkitesh, Vijay V.; Muralidhar, Sai; and P Alex, Jacob
(2025)
"The Supreme Court of India's Use of Inherent Power under Article 142 of the Constitution: An Empirical Study,"
National Law School of India Review: Vol. 37:
Iss.
1, Article 1.
Available at:
https://repository.nls.ac.in/nlsir/vol37/iss1/1
