Sachet Singh and Devdeep Ghosh here shed some light on Deontology and Consequentialism in the Indian context through decisions of the Supreme Court.
Abstract
Article 142 of the Constitution of India is the fountainhead of the Supreme Court’s inherent powers to do ‘complete justice’. A complete justice provision, by its very nature, is controversial and often debated. It is evident from an analysis of the case law pivoted around the use of Article 142 that the Apex Court has often shown scant regard to statutory law when the operation of such statutory law has been perceived as an impediment in the pursuit of justice. The purpose of this paper is to survey the decisions of the Apex Court and contextualize it within the framework of two schools of jurisprudential thought – deontology and consequentialism – in an effort to identify the underlying thought process of various benches of the Supreme Court over the years.