Write short note on Federal Court established under Government of India Act, 1935.

Origins and Establishment

Section 200 of the Government of India Act, 1935 gave birth to the Federal Court, which actually commenced its sittings on October 1, 1937, well before the rest of the federal scheme envisaged by the Act could be brought into force. Sir Maurice Gwyer was its first Chief Justice, and the court functioned right up to the eve of the Constitution's commencement, being finally replaced by the Supreme Court of India on January 26, 1950 — with Sir Hiralal Kania, the last Chief Justice of the Federal Court, becoming, quite fittingly, the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. This continuity of personnel was no accident; it reflected the framers' intention that the new Supreme Court should inherit the mantle, and indeed much of the working philosophy, of its predecessor.

Composition and Structure

The Federal Court consisted of a Chief Justice and such number of other judges as His Majesty might from time to time think fit to appoint, subject to a statutory maximum. Judges were required to have held high judicial office, either as a High Court judge for a minimum period or as a distinguished practitioner, and they held office until the age of retirement fixed under the Act. The design here anticipated the later provisions of Chapter IV of Part V of the Constitution, which is loosely modelled on Chapter I of Part IX of the 1935 Act — so much so that the very architecture of judicial independence we take for granted today, security of tenure, fixed salaries, and insulation from arbitrary removal, traces its lineage directly to this Act.

Jurisdiction of the Court

The jurisdiction of the Federal Court fell into three broad heads, and it is worth walking through each because each reveals something of the federal character the 1935 Act was trying, imperfectly, to build.

• Original jurisdiction: the court could decide disputes between the federation and the provinces, or between provinces themselves, provided the dispute involved a question of law or fact on which the existence or extent of a legal right depended.

• Appellate jurisdiction: appeals lay to it from judgments of High Courts, particularly where a substantial question of constitutional interpretation was involved, or where a High Court had exercised original jurisdiction and the matter carried sufficient importance.

• Advisory jurisdiction: the Governor-General could refer questions of law of public importance to the court for its opinion, a device that has survived almost unchanged into Article 143 of the present Constitution.

The court itself observed that its advisory opinions were not to be treated as any less binding merely because they were rendered in an advisory capacity — a statement that has continued to guide how the Supreme Court's own advisory opinions under Article 143 are received by subordinate courts even today.

Ordinance-Making and Judicial Review

One of the more instructive episodes in the Federal Court's short life concerned its treatment of the Governor-General's ordinance-making power under Section 72 of the 1935 Act, a provision authorising ordinances for the peace and good government of British India during emergencies. In Bhagat Singh v. King-Emperor, Lord Dunedin, speaking for the Privy Council, remarked that it was the Governor-General alone who could judge whether a state of emergency existed, and that any other view would render the whole provision inept. The Federal Court itself, in Lakhi Narayan v. State of Bihar, went further and held that the question whether circumstances existed justifying the promulgation of an ordinance was simply not a matter within the competence of courts to investigate. The Privy Council reinforced this in King-Emperor v. Benoari Lal Sarma, holding that the Governor-General was not even required to state that an emergency existed or what it consisted of, so long as he acted bona fide. This line of reasoning on subjective satisfaction proved remarkably durable; it was carried forward almost verbatim into the interpretation of Article 123 dealing with the President's ordinance-making power, illustrating how deeply the constitutional culture of 1935 continued to inform post-Independence adjudication.

Appeals to the Privy Council

An important, and to modern eyes somewhat curious, feature of the Federal Court's jurisdiction was that it was not the final court of appeal. Appeals from its decisions lay further to the Privy Council in London, the ultimate appellate authority for the whole of British India. This is why Article 135 of the Constitution today preserves, for the Supreme Court, jurisdiction that the Federal Court used to exercise immediately before the Constitution commenced, precisely so that litigants who had a vested right of appeal to the Federal Court would not lose that right merely because a new Constitution had come into being. The imperial character of the arrangement, a colonial federal court subordinate to a London tribunal, is itself telling of why the 1935 Act, despite its federal trappings, could never be a truly federal constitution in spirit.

Legacy in the Present Constitution

The significance of the Federal Court lies less in what it decided and more in what it became the template for. The Supreme Court of India succeeded to its jurisdiction, its first Chief Justice was drawn from its ranks, and its jurisprudence on questions such as the scope of judicial review over executive satisfaction, the nature of advisory opinions, and the treatment of legislative lists, formed the foundation upon which the Constituent Assembly built. When the Supreme Court today exercises jurisdiction under Article 135 in matters where Articles 133 and 134 do not apply, it does so precisely because that residual jurisdiction was once exercised by the Federal Court under the law then existing. In this sense, the Federal Court was not merely a historical curiosity of the transitional period; it was the crucible in which the institutional identity of India's highest court was first forged.