By Nagesh Bhushan How India's Supreme Court judges may be trading favorable rulings for comfortable post-retirement sinecures — and what the data reveal about justice for sale New Delhi | Mar 2026 Corruption, as any economist will tell you, is fundamentally a story about incentives. Bribe a customs officer and she waves your container through. Offer a politician a directorship and he tweaks the regulation. The logic is ancient and depressingly universal. What is rarer — and considerably more alarming — is when the same logic appears to grip the apex court of the world's most populous democracy. A paper published in the Journal of Law and Economics by Madhav Aney and Giovanni Ko of Singapore Management University, and Shubhankar Dam of the University of Portsmouth, makes a disquieting argument. Studying 652 judgments of the Supreme Court of India between 1999 and 2014, the authors find statistical evidence that some judges ruled in favour of the government...
♦️ The Mystery: Do Judges Trade Rulings for Jobs? In a robust democracy, the judiciary acts as the ultimate neutral referee. However, researchers Madhav S. Aney, Shubhankar Dam, and Giovanni Ko uncovered a pattern in the Supreme Court of India that suggested the referee might be playing for the home team. They observed a frequent "revolving door" where retiring justices were quickly appointed to prestigious government positions. This raised the specter of a "Quid Pro Quo"—the suspicion that judges were systematically trading favorable verdicts for post-retirement career security. The researchers deconstructed this mystery into two measurable questions: 1. The Incentive: Do judges respond to the temptation of future appointments by ruling in favor of the government? 2. The Reward: Does the government actually follow through by appointing the specific judges who ruled in its favor? While the "ruling-for-jo...