Procedural And Substantive Innovations And Its Applications By Supreme Court For Environmental Jurisprudence

Abstract

Introduction

The growing interference of Court in environmental issues, however, is being seen as a part of the pro-active role of the Supreme Court in the form of frequent creation of successive strategies to support rule of law, enforce fundamental rights of the citizens and constitutional decorum aimed at the protection and improvement of environment. A number of unique innovative methods are identifiable, each of which is new and in some cases opposing to the conventional legalistic understanding of the judicial function.[1]

It is important to note that these judicial inventions have become part of the larger Indian jurisprudence ever since the Court has started overriding in the affairs of executive in the post emergency period.[2]The methods initiated in resolving environmental litigation

[1] Jamie Cassel’s, ‘Judicial Activism and Public Interest Litigation in India: Attempting the   Impossible?’,37 (3) The American Journal of Comparative Law 495 (1989).

[2] Gobind Das, ‘The Supreme Court: An Overview’, in B.N. Kripal et al. (eds), Supreme But Not Infallible (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001). The author argues that the Indian Supreme Court had always been uncomfortable with former Prime Minister of India, Mrs. Indira Gandhi’s regime; during the late sixties her economic and political policies were struck down in the Bank Nationalisation and Privy purse cases; in the early seventies the Court was locked in the Kesavananda battle and again in her election cases; when the Court supported her emergency in the Shukla case and Detenu case it was execrated by public opinion; and during the Janata rule the Court was confirming legal attempts for her political extinction in the Special Courts Bill and Assembly Dissolution cases. Whenever the Court opposed her policies it had to pay the penalty in the form of suppressions of judges and constitutional amendments. In the post-emergency period (1975-77), the Court decided not to interfere with the major political and economic decisions of government and opened up new fields of interest and different areas of judicial activities; it chose the poor, the helpless, the oppressed in the name of social justice, constitutional conscience, and the rule of law.