Do court vacations matter: evidence from the Bombay High Court

by Tushar Anand, Pavithra Manivannan, and Bhargavi Zaveri-Shah.

Introduction

Court vacations are often invoked as a problematic feature of the Indian judiciary. The discourse on this includes blaming court vacations for case delays, petitions to reduce the length of court vacations, and substituting them with staggered leave for judges. This discourse is characterised by the classic divide that cuts across most Indian discourse on court reforms. Lawyers and judges emphasize the importance of court vacations for overall judge productivity. Often, they perceive the criticism of court vacations as being politically motivated or as an attack on judicial integrity. Other stakeholders underscore the problems of delays and pendency, and compare the courts’ calendar with that of other public organisations. In the event, neither side is able to support their argument by demonstrating the extent of delays attributable to court vacations. The puzzle on how much do court vacations actually affect case durations and disposal continues to remain unanswered. This article presents some first estimates on the impact of court vacations on these outputs.

During the vacation period, courts function with minimal capacity. This allows us to compare the functioning of a court during its vacation and non-vacation periods. Using a dataset of civil and commercial cases filed over about six years at the Bombay High Court, we evaluate the extent to which vacations at the court affected its productivity, measured in terms of case disposal rates and the lifecycle of cases.

Unsurprisingly, we find that there is a significant drop in the daily number of cases filed and disposed by the Bombay High Court during vacations, compared to the non-vacation periods of the year. However, this gap shrinks over time. Second, the fact that a case is filed during the vacation period affects its initial phases, but does not affect the duration within which it will get disposed of. In sum, while court vacations affect the initial phase of a case schedule, dispensing with court vacations will not make a significant difference to the disposal rates or the disposal duration of cases at the Bombay High Court.

Court vacations

Indian courts, such as the supreme court, high courts and district courts, and most tribunals, are scheduled to take three vacations – summer, festive, winter – each year. The summer vacation lasts for a little more than a month and the festive and winter vacations last for a little more than week. While the concept of court vacations is traceable to the colonial origins of the Indian judicial system, they eventually became a part of the rules governing the functioning of the Supreme Court and High Courts. The practice is not unique to India and is followed in several developed countries, such as the United States, Australia and Singapore.

During vacations, Indian courts function with vacation benches of judges to hear urgent matters that come up during this time, and a lower staff at the court registry. A comparison of the sitting list of judges for the Bombay High Court shows that, on a non-vacation day, 27 courtrooms are functional. On the other hand, on vacation days, not more than four courtrooms are functional. A reduced number of judges will likely affect the scheduling and eventual disposal of cases filed during vacations. A reduced registry capacity will likely affect the filing of new cases and scheduling of proceedings for existing cases. To be sure, court vacations affect not only the working hours of courts, but also the entire ecosystem around it. For instance, it is generally hard to find lawyers to appear for litigants before vacation benches during this time, further slowing down proceedings. Since these changes are endogeneous to court vacations, it is hard to isolate the impact of lower judges from that of the absence of lawyers willing to work during the vacation period, on the lifecycle of a case. Finally, what cases are construed as ‘urgent’ varies across judges’ interpretation of urgency.

In this institutional setting, we ask the following questions to evaluate the impact of court vacations on overall case durations at the Bombay High Court:

1. Do case filings and disposals drop during vacation periods?
2. Do cases filed during court vacations take longer to get their first hearing?
3. Do cases filed during court vacations take longer to get disposed of?

Data and Methodology

We collect and analyse the data of cases involving all civil suits and commercial suits, which were filed at the Bombay High Court during the seven year period from January 2017 to December 2023 (Study Period). For each of these cases, our dataset captures information on the entire life-cycle of the case available on the respective courts’ websites. This includes the date of filing, the dates on which hearings were conducted, and the date of disposal. Table 1 shows the total number of cases in our dataset and their status, that is, whether the cases were pending or disposed, at the time of data collection. We then count the number of days on which these courts were on vacation during our Study Period, using the vacation dates published on their websites. On an average, the Bombay High Court has 52 days of vacation per year and the average number of working days is 235.

Table 1: Data description

Cases
Disposed	1379
Pending	2529
Total	3908

One caveat. Our results account for select case-types (civil suits and commercial suits), as our dataset comprises such cases. Given that criminal cases or writ petitions, particularly those pertaining to questions of liberty or reliefs pre-empting State actions, have a higher element of urgency, it is possible that the findings for these case types will differ from our findings for civil and commercial cases.

Impact of court vacations on case filing and disposal

We begin by comparing the daily average number of cases filed and disposed before the Bombay High Court during the vacation and non-vacation period (Table 2). At the Bombay High Court, on an average, the number of cases filed during non-vacation days is thrice the number of cases filed during vacation days. Further, the Bombay High Court is able to dispose four times the number of cases on non-vacation days, compared to the vacation days.

Table 2: Average number of cases filed and disposed per day

	Vacation days	Non-vacation days
Cases filed	0.67	2.23
Cases disposed of	0.21	0.88

We examine whether the difference between the number of cases filed during vacation and non-vacation periods or between the number of cases disposed of during these two periods, is statistically significant. The standard t-test and z-test used for determining statistical significance assume a normal distribution of the underlying data. However, our data is not amenable to this test for two reasons. One, the number of observed cases in non-vacation period is five times than that in the vacation period. Second, the distribution of the per day number of cases filed and disposed of is right-biased, with a long tail. We used a two-sample Kolmogorov-Smirnov test to confirm that the two samples come from different distributions. In the absence of the standard tests (t-test and z-test), we use a bootstrapped sampling method to estimate the statistical significance of the difference in means of the two sets (vacation and non-vacation) of our data. This method allows us to create a normal distribution of the data by repeatedly drawing random samples from each of the two sets. This approach shows that the difference in means for the number of cases filed and disposed during vacation and non-vacation days is statistically significant at the five percent level.

At first glance, these findings might suggest that had the court not been on vacation, case disposals would have increased by a factor of four. However, this disposal rate is likely not linear. For instance, a quarter-wise analysis of cases filed and disposed of shows that these differences reduce (Table 3). That is, the difference in the number of filings and disposals in Quarters 2 and 4 that are affected by vacation days (Apr-Jun and Oct-Dec) and Quarters 1 and 3 that are not affected by vacation days (Jan-Mar and Jul-Sep), are much smaller.

Table 3: Quarter-wise average of cases filed and disposed

	Q1	Q2*	Q3	Q4*
Cases filed	162.57	128.29	134.86	132.58
Cases disposed of	51.29	38.71	58.43	46.00

^{*Denotes quarters affected by vacation days.}

Impact of vacations on case timelines

The analysis in the previous section would reflect the impact of court vacation on the overall productivity of the court. However, what is the impact of court vacations for an individual litigant? In this section, we examine whether the timelines for important milestones in a case vary for a litigant who filed her case during the vacation period, compared to a litigant who filed her case during the non-vacation days.

We estimate the time taken for cases to be scheduled for its first hearing and time taken for them to be disposed of. These estimations are made using the survival analysis approach used by Manivannan et al, 2023. This approach is a useful measure of individual case life cycles. It shows the likelihood of a case awaiting an important milestone, such as a first hearing or disposal, at different points in time.

Table 4: Probability of first hearing

	Vacation days	Non-vacation days
1 month	6.47%	7.24%
3 months	25.10%	23.35%
6 months	49.39%	47.20%

Table 4 shows the probability of a case getting its first hearing within one month, three months and six months of filing. The table compares these probabilities for cases filed during vacation days and non-vacation days. The probability of a case filed during the non-vacation period getting its first hearing within one month of filing is only slightly higher than the corresponding probability of a case filed during the non-vacation period. As time progresses, this difference disappears. In fact, after the first month of filing, cases filed during the vacation period have a marginally higher probability of getting their first hearing than cases filed during the non-vacation period. In sum, our analysis suggests that the “vacation effect” on case scheduling persists for not more than a month.

Similarly, we estimate the probability of a case getting disposed of within one to two years of its filing. Table 5 compares these probabilities for cases filed during vacation days and non-vacation days. At the Bombay High Court, there is about 5-6% higher disposal probability for cases filed during the non-vacation days. Overall, the “vacation effect” is marginal and temporary, and does not seem to affect the case duration for a litigant.

Table 5: Probability of disposal

	Cases filed on
	Vacation days	Non-vacation days
6 months	6.95%	11.03%
1 year	11.62%	17.95%
2 years	22.59%	27.11%

Conclusion

Our analysis provides the first estimates on the impact of Indian court vacations on some measurable elements of a court’s functioning. Historical data from the Bombay High Court for civil and commercial cases shows that court vacations have a statistically significant impact on the number of cases filed and disposed of on a daily basis. While this finding is perhaps unsurprising, these differences disappear over time. Further, they do not substantially affect the overall duration of the case, even as they have a small effect on the initial phases of cases filed during court vacations.

A key limitation of our analysis is that it does not account for the impact, if any, of court vacations on a judge at the individual level. That is, it does not capture the possible intangible productivity gains that accrue from a holiday. It is possible, for instance, that when a judge goes on a vacation, she writes more judgements, reads more jurisprudence or returns with boosted productivity. The data available in the public domain does not allow us to measure these impacts on judge productivity. Besides, if there were such impacts on a judge, they are not a powerful explanation for a court vacation where all the judges go on vacation simultaneously. These benefits would accrue even where judges take leave as per their own convenience during the calendar year. Therefore, while measuring such impacts is important for its own sake, it does not add to the vacation-related discourse which our analysis speaks to.

Finally, several scholars have started adopting the empirical approach in evaluating Indian courts and tribunals, using a variety of tools ranging from simple summary statistics to more advanced analyses grounded in statistics, and using the tools of natural language processing and artificial intelligence. We provide yet another demonstration that questions pertaining to the impact of interventions in the Indian court system are amenable to empirical research. Expanding such analyses to other courts will strengthen the discourse on court vacations by shifting from pure normative perspectives to empirically grounded questions on whether vacations actually increase the productivity of a court.

References

Pavithra Manivannan, Susan Thomas and Bhargavi Zaveri-Shah (2023), Helping litigants make informed choices in resolving debt disputes, The Leap Blog, 15 June 2023.

Law Commission of India (2009), Reforms in the Judiciary: Some suggestions, Report No. 230, August 2009.

Alex Tsun (2020), Chapter 9, Applications to Computing, Probability & Statistics with Applications to Computing, 2020.

Tushar Anand and Pavithra Manivannan are researchers at XKDR Forum and Bhargavi Zaveri-Shah is a doctoral candidate at the National University of Singapore. The authors thank Susan Thomas and Geetika Palta for useful discussions.

Source: https://blog.theleapjournal.org/2024/09/do-court-vacations-matter-evidence-from.html