NJAC Judgment (Fourth Judges Case, 2015)

The NJAC Judgment, formally Supreme Court Advocates-on-Record Association v. Union of India (2015) and commonly called the Fourth Judges Case, was decided on 16 October 2015 by a five-judge Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court of India. The case challenged the Constitution (Ninety-ninth Amendment) Act, 2014 and the National Judicial Appointments Commission Act, 2014, both of which had been ratified by the requisite number of state legislatures and received presidential assent in December 2014. The amendment inserted Articles 124A, 124B and 124C and amended Articles 124(2), 217(1), 222(1) and 231(2) to replace the judicial collegium with a six-member commission for appointing and transferring judges of the Supreme Court and High Courts. The constitutional foundation of the challenge was the basic-structure doctrine articulated in Kesavananda Bharati v. State of Kerala (1973), under which the independence of the judiciary forms an inviolable feature beyond Parliament's amending power under Article 368.

The procedural sequence began with the legal architecture the NJAC sought to install. The National Judicial Appointments Commission as designed under Article 124A comprised six members: the Chief Justice of India as chairperson, the two senior-most Supreme Court judges, the Union Minister of Law and Justice, and two eminent persons. The two eminent persons were to be nominated by a committee consisting of the Prime Minister, the Chief Justice of India and the Leader of Opposition (or leader of the largest opposition party) in the Lok Sabha, with one nominee drawn from Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, Other Backward Classes, minorities or women. Crucially, Section 5(2) and Section 6(6) of the NJAC Act provided that the commission could not recommend a candidate if any two members dissented, granting an effective veto to any two of the six members.

The bench led by Justice J.S. Khehar, with Justices J. Chelameswar, Madan B. Lokur, Kurian Joseph and Adarsh Kumar Goel, ruled 4:1 to strike down both the 99th Amendment and the NJAC Act in their entirety. The majority held that the participation of the Union Law Minister and the two-member veto mechanism compromised the primacy of the judiciary in appointments, which the Court treated as an essential component of judicial independence and therefore part of the basic structure. The Court revived the collegium system established by the Second Judges Case (1993) and clarified in the Third Judges Case (1998), under which a collegium of senior judges led by the Chief Justice controls appointments. Justice Chelameswar delivered the lone dissent, arguing that the collegium lacked transparency and accountability and that the amendment deserved deference as the considered will of Parliament.

The judgment provoked sharp institutional reaction across New Delhi. The Union Government, then under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, expressed strong disagreement; Finance Minister Arun Jaitley described the verdict in 2015 as "the tyranny of the unelected." Having struck down the amendment, the Court itself acknowledged deficiencies in the collegium and, in a supplementary hearing concluded in December 2015, invited the Government to frame a Memorandum of Procedure (MoP) to improve transparency, eligibility criteria, and the handling of complaints. The MoP became a protracted point of friction between the Law Ministry and the Supreme Court collegium, with disputes over the national-security clause permitting the Government to reject names persisting through the late 2010s and into the 2020s without final settlement.

The NJAC Judgment is distinct from the broader collegium system it restored: the collegium is the operative appointment mechanism, whereas the NJAC Judgment is the constitutional ruling that preserved it by invalidating its statutory replacement. It must also be distinguished from the First Judges Case (S.P. Gupta, 1981), which had favoured executive primacy, and from the Second and Third Judges Cases, which built the collegium itself. The NJAC Judgment is the Fourth in this lineage and the only one to test a formal constitutional amendment rather than to reinterpret existing Articles. Unlike ordinary judicial review of statutes, the case applied the basic-structure standard, the most stringent threshold available against constitutional amendments.

The decision remains among the most contested in the basic-structure jurisprudence. Critics, including some constitutional scholars, contend that the Court protected its own institutional interest and that the two-member veto could have been read down rather than the entire framework voided. The collegium has continued to draw criticism for opacity, delayed elevations, and Government practice of selectively withholding or sitting on recommended names despite the established principle that reiterated collegium recommendations are binding. Periodic suggestions to revive a commission model have surfaced in Parliament and in Vice-Presidential and ministerial commentary, including pointed remarks by Vice-President Jagdeep Dhankhar in 2022 and 2023 questioning the basic-structure doctrine itself, though no fresh amendment has been introduced.

For the working practitioner, the NJAC Judgment is the controlling authority on how India's higher judiciary is constituted and a paradigmatic application of the basic-structure doctrine to a duly ratified amendment. UPSC General Studies Paper II candidates must locate it within the Judges Cases sequence, understand its relationship to Articles 124, 124A, 217 and 368, and grasp the unresolved Memorandum of Procedure standoff. Policy analysts and journalists covering judicial reform treat the case as the benchmark against which every subsequent proposal for an appointments commission is measured, and as the clearest modern illustration of the tension between democratic accountability and judicial independence in Indian constitutional design.