Court System under the Constitution of India & Rule of Law, Independence of Judiciary & Separation of Powers

Every few years someone in Parliament or in the press says the law needs updating and nothing happens for a decade. India's answer to that problem is older than the Constitution itself: a standing body of legal experts, called a Law Commission, whose entire job is to notice when yesterday's good law has become today's bad law. Four of these existed before independence, and India has had one continuously since 1955 — and this topic is about how that body fits into the constitutional court system this module is named for.

In two minutes

The constitutional court system rests on Parliament's continuous willingness to update the law that courts apply, and the Law Commission of India — a body with no equivalent status to a court, yet a direct hand in almost every major code the courts use — is the institution that has driven that updating since 1834.

The rest of this chapter

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