In Indian law are courts required to give similar verdicts for similar cases?

Question

From what I understand this power is discretionary to courts other than supreme courts. But there isn't much material on it. Is there any grey area that I might be missing ? And are the decisions of supreme court binding on high courts of states ?

Answer 1

The difficult part is deciding when two cases are similar.

Precedents from higher courts govern what the law is in a case. But, a lot of what trial court judges do is to boil down a mountain of evidence to determine authoritatively what facts actually transpired before applying the law to those facts. This involves immense amounts of discretion and judgment.

Also, while in some cases the law provides very clear guidance to a judge about what to do, in other cases, the law is vague enough that two different judges can reach two different verdicts, both of which are legally correct, on the same set of facts.

For example, in a divorce case (involving made up facts and law to illustrate the idea), suppose that the two main assets of the family are a house and retirement account of equal value and that the facts as applied to the relevant law say that the value of the assets must be divided equally between the husband and wife. One judge could award the house to the husband and the retirement account to the wife, while another judge could award the retirement account to the husband and the house to the wife. But both judges would have complied perfectly with the law.

Similarly, in a divorce there are a variety of different custody plans for children that could all conform to the law and different judges could choose different plans and each be correct.

As another example, suppose that a bulldozer destroys a house and the person whose house is destroyed sues for money damages. The judge is presented with two different appraisals from equally qualified appraisers for the value of the house, both of whom superficially at least, are using proper appraisal methods. But one appraiser says the house was worth 1,000,000 and another says that the house was worth 1,500,000. Realistically, any verdict the judge renders between 1,000,000 and 1,500,000 could be upheld as legally correct.

Because the process of turning evidence into legal verdicts involves so much discretion and so many judgment calls, and because it is rare that two cases are factually identical, the goal of giving similar verdicts for similar cases, is difficult to achieve and difficult even to evaluate in real life.

It is almost certain that similar cases often result in dissimilar verdicts, and not infrequently the reasons for this (like using personal ideologies as opposed to what the law demands to resolve close cases) are not good ones. But deciding how common that is, or in what kinds of cases it is most troubling that this happens, is very hard to determine.

Answer 2

Most legal systems try to encourage different courts to give similar verdicts for similar cases.

India has a unified common-law based system, so judgements of superior courts set binding precedents that are binding on all inferior courts. See this page for reference. Thus judgements of the Supreme Court set binding precedents for all High Courts and all District Courts, and judgements of any High Court sets binding precedents for all District Courts. (This is in contrast to the US, for example, where a state appeal court judgement is only binding on courts in the same state, and a federal appeal court judgement is only binding on courts in the same federal district.)

A judgement of a one court is not binding on another court at the same level (so two High Courts can produce different judgements, as can two district courts).