Now this brings us back to the foremost question. Can the apex court, if dissatisfied with a ruling of its own, constitute a larger bench to overturn its own ruling? The larger Constitution Benches do not, in a strict sense, go into the question of disputed facts in any cases. However, the Bench during the NN Global hearing expressed its opinion that if justice is needed to be done on facts, the Court would not refrain from doing so.
Further, none of the cases decided by a larger bench ever goes sans the facts of that particular case. Therefore, whenever the apex court constitutes a larger bench each time a judge differs or refuses to agree with the ruling of another judge of the same court, the litigant may never see the end of their litigation at all.
In my opinion, what the apex court is doing is sitting in appeal over cases which have already attained finality vide either review, curative, reference or merely clarification applications. This is causing enormous confusion as well as overreach of the powers of the final court.
US Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson once said, “We are not final because we are infallible, but we are infallible only because we are final.” It means that the final court of the country is vested with the duty to do absolute justice and nothing less, but not at the cost of repetitive exercise of jurisdiction that it does not posses or hold.
Source: Barandbench
