Blitz Bureau
JUSTICE Surya Kant of the Supreme Court has backed reforms to enhance transparency in the collegium system even as he strongly defended its role in safeguarding judicial independence, reported Bar and Bench.
He said that recent steps by the Supreme Court reflect a growing commitment to public confidence and accountability. “Despite its imperfections, the collegium remains a crucial institutional safeguard,” he said during an address in the United States recently.
Delivering a keynote at Seattle University’s Roundglass India Centre, Justice Kant acknowledged the sustained criticism faced by the current appointment mechanism to the higher judiciary. While describing the collegium process as “imperfect,” he stressed that it remains essential for insulating judges from executive interference.
He said that judicial autonomy must be continually asserted, negotiated, and exercised within a framework of democratic self-restraint.
Justice Kant, who is slated to be the next Chief Justice of India, underscored that the judiciary’s legitimacy is “most enduring when it is exercised with a sense of humility.”
Courts must be seen not as omnipotent arbiters but as co-travellers in the democratic journey, grounded in constitutional values, he opined. Justice Kant delivered three speeches in Washington State – first at the Washington Supreme Court in Olympia, then at Seattle University and finally at Microsoft’s global headquarters in Redmond.
The topics spanned themes from constitutional fidelity and public interest litigation to the challenges and promises of artificial intelligence in legal systems. At the Washington State Supreme Court, the judge drew comparisons between foundational decisions like Marbury v. Madison in the US and Kesavananda Bharati in India, arguing that courts on both sides of the world are not passive interpreters but “vigilant sentinels” guarding constitutional ethos. “Liberty, equality, and self-governance are not historical accidents; they are the hard-earned legacy of those who dared to envision a just society,” he stated.
From Olympia to Redmond, the thread of constitutional morality remained central to his message. At Microsoft’s campus, Justice Kant turned to the evolving role of artificial intelligence in judicial infrastructure, highlighting innovations such as India’s SUVAS translation engine, automatic speech recognition-based real-time transcription in constitutional bench hearings and the LegRAA research assistant.
