Case Law Analysis or Cricket Commentary?

By Vijay Kumar

THE Vodafone case has attracted international attention and some strange (to say the least) reporting. This is how the International Tax Review reported,

Strong legal arguments were not the only thing on Vodafone's side in their triumph at the Indian Supreme Court; statistics show that a victory was inevitable. The judgment from Chief Justice SH Kapadia was just the latest tax decision he has made that favoured the taxpayer. As the table shows, over the past four years Kapadia has found 76% of tax cases in favour of the taxpayer. This is by far and above the percentages of his colleagues.

Name of Supreme Court judge	Assessee	Revenue	Assessee in percentage	Revenue in percentage
Income tax judgments passed by Supreme Court judges*
Justice SH Kapadia **	65	29	76	24
Justice SP Bharucha	72	101	42	58
Justice Suhas Sen	13	27	33	67
Justice Ranganathan	18	12	60	40
Justice Sabyasachi Mukherjee	22	15	59	41
Justice Jeevan Reddy	12	14	46	54
Justice YV Chandrachud	10	12	45	55
Justice K Venkataswami	4	3	57	43
Justice YK Sabharwal	1	5	17	83
Justice Arijit Pasayat	14	13	52	48
Justice GB Pattanaik	8	16	33	67
Justice RC Lahoti	15	14	52	48
Justice BN Kirpal	5	5	50	50
* In favour of ** Jan 1 2008 - Jan 24 2012 Source: Taxmann/Taxsutra

The journal, as can be seen from the table, credited the source to Taxmann/Taxsutra.

Now can you predict a judgement based on the past verdicts of a judge? Is it fair? Are we analyzing a horse race or a cricket match?

A patient about to undergo an operation asked his doctor about the chances of his survival. “Hundred percent, said the doctor.” “How can you be so sure?”, asked the patient. “In this type of operations, the chances of survival, as statistics reveal, are ten percent; So far, all my nine patients have died and statistically, you are sure to survive!”, said the doctor.