‘Every case has a story’: Delhi HC judge on why judges are ‘great authors’

NEW DELHI: Delhi high court judge Justice Anish Dayal described judges as “great authors” and courtrooms as a “remarkable theatre”, drawing parallels between the judicial process and storytelling.“Judges are great authors. In our case files, we have real stories, real characters, plots, sometimes real, sometimes fictitious. We have problems and, in our judgments, we have resolutions,” PTI quoted Justice Dayal as saying. He made the remarks during his keynote address at the 11th edition of the Himalayan Echoes Festival in Nainital on Friday.“The classic core of a good story is character, problem, and resolution. So, we do it every day, 60-100 cases a day. I guess I am qualified to be here in the literary festival,” he added.Reflecting on his three worlds — the courtroom, literature and the mountains — Justice Dayal said each offered distinct lessons, governed respectively by “rules”, “imagination” and the “uncluttered” force of nature.

He noted that nearly 80% of court cases involved ordinary people, whose stories were often hidden behind the “antiseptic language” of case files.“Every single day we read real stories,” he said, highlighting the emotional toll of handling criminal cases and reading accounts of victims’ experiences.Justice Dayal described a judge’s role as applying “cold, objective reasoning and fairness” while navigating allegations, facts and the law.He also shared amusing examples of mistranslations in court documents. The Hindi expression “mooh boli behan” was once rendered as “mouth spoken sister”, while “somersault” became “the salt that you have in the summer”. Another document used the term “clientess”.“We deal with language in all its corrupted forms and archaic forms also,” he remarked, inviting writers to explore court files for their linguistic curiosities.