ABSTRACT

India’s supreme court is, to paraphrase George Gadbois, the “most powerful court in the world”, having virtually become an imperium in imperio, an order within an order. In the past two decades, the higher judiciary transformed constitutionally non-justiciable economic,and social rights to basic education, health, food, and shelter,among others, into legally enforceable rights.1 In a famous judgment giving all children the right to elementary education,the court said that a right could be treated as fundamental even if it were not present in 2

According to economist Jean Drèze, the introduction of cooked midday meals in primary schools would not have happened without the supreme court cracking the whip. The Indian courts illustrate scholarly characterizations of this century as the global age of “decline and fall of parliamentary sovereignty,” the “global expansion of judicial power,” and even a “juristocracy.”3