Overboard or Overbroad?
Legal Corner Icon — the image was hosted by the publisher and was not captured.I literally went overboard today with the word 'overbroad' in the landmark High Court judgement we carried yesterday on the Show Cause Notices issued by DRI - -CUS.The following sentences were the cause:
If all officers of the Customs appointed as such prior to 6th July 2011 are deemed to be 'proper officers., then the administrative chaos that is likely to result, as was pointed out in the Sayed Ali case, would persist. The powers conferred would be overbroad since it would be without any territorial or pecuniary jurisdictional limit.
There is merit in the contention that Section 28(11) is overbroad inasmuch as it confers jurisdiction on a plurality of officers on the same subject matter which would result in chaos, harassment, contrary and conflicting decisions.
I asked ten lawyers what the overbroad in the above sentences meant. All of them told me, it must be a typing mistake and the word could be overboard as in the context in which it was used, section 28(11) seemed to 'go to the extremes'.
There is a not so well known doctrine called overbreadth. Laws are required to be clear and precise. If a law is vague or overbroad, it can be declared as not valid. A law must be clear enough to be understood and must also be precise enough that it only applies to activities connected to the law's purpose. A law that is too vague is one that is incomprehensible. To break a law one must be capable of understanding it. An overbroad law differs from a vague law in that an overbroad law may be perfectly clear, but goes too far - the State, in pursuing a legitimate objective, uses means which are broader than is necessary to accomplish that objective.Laws that go too far in the means they employ in implementing a legislative objective are considered overbroad, or unnecessarily sweeping.
In the famous Shreyas Singhal case , the Supreme Court held that Section 66A of the Information Technology Act creates an offence which is vague and overbroad, and, therefore, unconstitutional. It was struck down on the ground of overbreadth.
In his scholarly judgement in the L&T case - , Justice Goda Raghuram observed,
Whether a legislation intending to extract components of composite transactions and levy tax only on authorized components thereof must specify such intent categorically and employ unambiguous and appropriate verbal formulae, to so signify its specific intention;alternatively, whether ambiguous or overbroad significations would suffice.
Imprecise legislation and which accommodates constitutionally prohibited trenching (by design or default in drafting) and/or in the fond hope that such an overreaching legislation would be administered in a benign fashion (by executive agencies presumably having sufficient scholarship of the jurisprudence of and the limits upon legislative powers, imposed by a federal constitutional arrangement), would not pass judicial muster.
As an inevitable consequence, a vague/overbroad definition of a taxable service coupled with an ambiguous charging and an indeterminate valuation provision, would not suffice.
It's not overboard, but overbroad. Even our proof readers initially got confused and typed overboard, but rectified it later.