Discussing and computing the cost of Justice
Pradnya Talekar & Subhaprad Mohanty
SYNOPSIS:
As the title indicates the paper is aimed to discuss the intricacies of the economics of justice production in India.
We would be comparing the nature of justice system in India to a market system and determine whether it is a monopoly. Then we would work on understanding the various costs incurred in the production of justice – where justice system is a firm, justice is the good produced and litigants are the consumers. The costs not only would include litigant costs but also state expenditure on the justice system which comes through taxation. The first part of the paper would deal with formulating an index to “measure per unit cost of justice” and discuss the factors that should be included or excluded and reasons for it. While the latter part will deal with a specific case study of the Supreme Court of India, in which we will try to compute the per unit costs of securing justice by analysing the data of the year 2010. The aim of this analysis is to come out with a figure and compare it to the Per capita income and tax statistics. Also we would endeavour to discuss possible suggestions and corrections which could help in reducing these costs.
KEYS ISSUES:
i. Formulating the index
ii Factors like lawyers fees, opportunity cost, conversion of time taken in litigation to a unit of money.
iii. Comparison of salary between governments appointed lawyers and private lawyers.
RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
i. Interviews:
Ø Vikramjit Banerjee
Ø Prashant Bhushan& other pro bono lawyers.
Ø Registrar of Supreme Court
Ø Some Lawyers at Economics and law Practice firm in Mumbai.
ii.Data Collection
Ø Indian Law Institute.
Ø Supreme court
Ø Right to Information offices.
FEASIBILTY CONSTRAINTS:
There are constraints in terms of: Resources and time.The topic is new and there is absolutely no earlier study on this particular nexus of economics and legal system. Moreover computation of per unit cost of justice requires great deal of microeconomics knowledge which is different from our field of study. The limited time in the internship is another pressure factor.
TIME LINE:
WEEK3: Get data from SC and Law Ministry, and start theorising and formulating the index.
WEEK4: start making the first draft of the first part – dealing with nature of market and index formulation, while parallely working on the analysisng the SC dataset.
WEEK5& 6: compile figures, analyse them and use the index to compute per unit of justice in the SC, and finalise the paper.
