Writing better judgments: design lessons from the Indian judgment rewriting project

The Supreme Court of India prides itself as an agent of social change; however, its judgments have long been criticized for their length and use of technical language that makes it challenging for people to read and understand them. The current design of constitutional law judgments undermines the purposes judges seek to achieve in writing them. A possible alternative exists in the form of the Indian Feminist Judgements Project (‘IFJP’), which presents a new imagining of the means used to convey information/knowledge from judges to their audiences. I compare select IFJP judgments with their original counterparts to study the differences in design (and not substance), intending to showcase the inefficiencies of the current format used by judges. I use a satisficing framework, based on Herbert Simon’s work on bounded rationality, to gauge the extent to which both types of judgments achieve their stated objectives.