A hearing lasts twenty minutes. The order that records it r uns to two lines. The question the judge asked, the undertaking counsel gave, the assurance on which a party withdrew: it survives only in the memory of whoever sat in the room. Six months later, when the point is taken, those memories will not agree. A High Court preserves everything else. The hearing is the only part of a case we allow to disappear. Contempt is where this bites hardest. The fight there is rarely about what the order said, but about what was undertaken, in what words, and what the court understood it to mean.

I have seen what that costs. In a contempt petition I filed against the State, the judge hearing it took in open court precisely the view we had pleaded, and said so. The order sheet recorded none of it. By the next date the Bench had changed, the matter was heard afresh, and it went the other way. Whether the second view was right is not the point. The point is that I cannot show any forum what the first judge said, because nothing in the file retains it. The hearing happened. It left nothing behind. Nor is this confined to contempt. Almost every order opens with the words “heard learned counsel for the parties”, and a four-minute dismissal produces the same line as a forty-minute argument. Then there is the everyday texture of a courtroom. Litigants are spoken to sharply for mistakes their lawyers made. Juniors are told to sit down before they have opened.

Sarcasm from the Bench costs the judge........

© The Statesman