CJI Chandrachud Condemns ‘Forum Shopping’: What is this Practice?

What’s in today’s article?

• Why in News?
• What is Forum Shopping?
• Criticism of Forum Shopping
• Supreme Court’s View on Forum Shopping

Why in News?

• Recently, to a litigant appearing before him, the Chief Justice of India (CJI) DY Chandrachud said that he will not permit forum shopping.

What is Forum Shopping?

Image Caption: forum shopping

• When litigants or lawyers attempt to deliberately move their case to a particular judge or Court where they think the judgment could be more favourable, they are said to be “forum shopping.”
• Websters’s dictionary defines forum shopping as –
  • “practice of choosing the court in which to bring an action from among those courts that could properly exercise jurisdiction based on a determination of which court is likely to provide the most favourable outcome.”
• Lawyers think about which is the right forum to approach as part of their litigation strategy.
• For example, one could directly approach the Supreme Court via a public interest litigation case instead of the concerned High Court because the issue could get more eyeballs.

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Criticism of Forum Shopping

• Forum shopping is an obvious attempt to circumvent the process or avoid a particular judge and that is why it is frowned upon by the judges.
• Judges have cited the injustice caused to the other party in the case and overburdening some courts over others and interfering with judicial process.
• Even the US and UK courts have criticised the practice of forum shopping as something to be avoided or prohibited.
  • For instance, in the US, it has been reported that more than 40% of the patent suits are filed in a Federal Court in East Texas.

Supreme Court’s View on Forum Shopping

• The concept of forum shopping as not been rendered an exclusive definition in any Indian statute.
• The Supreme Court in its 1988 ruling in ‘Chetak Construction Ltd. vs. Om Prakash’ said –
  • “A litigant cannot be permitted choice of the forum,” and that every attempt at forum shopping “must be crushed with a heavy hand.
• In March 2022, in the case of ‘Vijay Kumar Ghai vs. State of W.B.’, Supreme Court termed forum shopping as a “disreputable practise by the courts” that “has no sanction and paramountcy in law”.
  • The court observed that despite condemning the practice, one of the respondents had filed three complaints, two in Delhi and one in Calcutta.
  • The court said that it indicated “the malafide intention” of the respondent, which was to harass the petitioners and “pressurise them into shelling out the investment.”
• In its 2017 ruling in ‘Union of India & Ors. vs. Cipla Ltd.’, the Supreme Court laid down a “functional test” to be adopted for forum shopping.
  • To determine whether a litigant is indulging in forum shopping or not, the court will check whether there is any functional similarity in the proceedings between one court and another or whether there is some sort of subterfuge on the part of a litigant.

Q1) What is judicial activism?

Judicial activism is the exercise of the power of judicial review to set aside government acts. Generally, the phrase is used to identify undesirable exercises of that power, but there is little agreement on which instances are undesirable.

Q2) What is the difference between judicial custody and police custody?

Police Custody means that police has the physical custody of the accused while Judicial Custody means an accused is in the custody of the concerned Magistrate. In former, the accused is lodged in police station lockup while in latter, it is the jail.

Source: CJI Chandrachud condemns ‘forum shopping’: What is this practice?