Litigant or lawyer has no right to demand early hearing of their pleas: HC

Chennai: Madras high court has asserted that an individual litigant or a lawyer has no vested or fundamental right to demand that their petition be listed ahead of litigations instituted prior in time, save through established exceptional protocols.“Equity demands that all litigants who knock on the doors of this court be treated with equal dignity and fairness. Allowing the petitioner to leapfrog over thousands of similarly situated litigants by judicial fiat would violate the principle of equal access to justice,” the first bench of Chief Justice Sushrut Arvind Dharmadhikari and Justice G Arul Murugan said.The court made the observations while dismissing a plea moved by advocate L K Charles Alexander seeking direction to the court registry to list for hearing 21 different petitions filed by him before both the court’s principal and Madurai bench.

He alleged that despite several representations the cases his cases were not listed due to ‘administrative lapse of the registry.’Refusing to concur, the bench said, “While this court holds a sympathetic regard for the professional anxieties of a young member of the Bar who feels answerable to his litigants, the remedy under Article 226 of the Constitution cannot be utilized as an administrative tool to bypass the high court’s established listing procedures.”

The administrative authority to control the flow of litigation is an essential facet of judicial independence, and a writ of mandamus cannot be issued to the registry to bypass or disrupt the allocation of cases as per roster, the court added.“We must also take judicial notice of the Herculean administrative challenges faced by the high court registry. The listing of cases is not a mechanical exercise of data entry. The registry processes thousands of fresh filings every week, alongside matters already pending. To maintain equity among litigants, cases must generally follow a chronological or category-wise queue,” the court said.