How Judges Are Appointed in India: The Collegium System Explained

Few features of the Indian judiciary draw as much comparative attention as the collegium system, a mechanism for appointing judges to the Supreme Court and High Courts that the judiciary itself created through case law rather than through a constitutional amendment or dedicated statute.

What the Constitution actually says

Articles 124 and 217 of the Constitution provide that judges are appointed by the President “after consultation with” the Chief Justice of India and other judges. Nothing in the original constitutional text creates a “collegium” by that name or gives the judiciary a decisive say.

How the collegium developed

A series of Supreme Court decisions, commonly called the Three Judges Cases (1981, 1993, and 1998), progressively reinterpreted “consultation” to mean something closer to “concurrence,” effectively transferring the decisive say in judicial appointments from the executive to a collegium of the Chief Justice of India and the four senior-most Supreme Court judges (a similar, smaller collegium operates for each High Court). The executive retains a formal role but, under the current interpretation, cannot appoint someone the collegium has not recommended, and if the collegium reiterates a recommendation the government has returned, the government is expected to accept it.

The failed attempt to replace it

In 2014, Parliament passed the National Judicial Appointments Commission (NJAC) Act, intended to replace the collegium with a body including executive and civil society representation. In 2015, the Supreme Court struck the NJAC down as unconstitutional, holding it threatened judicial independence, a central feature of the Constitution’s “basic structure.” The collegium system remains in place, and the decision is a frequently cited case study in comparative judicial independence scholarship precisely because the judiciary used constitutional review to protect its own appointment power.

Why this matters for comparative research

Most common law jurisdictions involve either the executive (US federal judges, UK pre-2005) or an independent appointments commission with mixed membership (UK’s current Judicial Appointments Commission) rather than a judiciary-controlled appointment process. India’s model, judiciary-dominated appointment with no statutory basis, is unusual enough to be its own distinct case study.

Lexfolio’s constitutional law notes cover the collegium cases in more procedural detail for readers building out a research paper on judicial independence.