The retiring type

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 more often when they stood to benefit from doing so — and that the government, in turn, rewarded compliant judges with prestigious post-retirement appointments. In short: jobs for justice(s).

The revolving robe

The mechanism alleged is not the crude brown-envelope variety. No one is suggesting that government officials slid envelopes of cash under judicial chambers. The corruption here is more genteel, more deniable — and perhaps, for that reason, more durable. It works as follows. In India, Supreme Court justices must retire on their 65th birthday. The mandatory exit creates an awkward interlude: distinguished legal minds, still sharp and status-hungry, suddenly find themselves constitutionally barred from practising law. Many turn to the government, which happens to be the country's most prolific dispenser of prestigious post-retirement berths — chairmanships of human-rights bodies, law commissions, competition tribunals and the like. The appointments are made by the executive, at its discretion, with precious little transparency.

Critics have long alleged that this arrangement creates an obvious conflict of interest. Former additional solicitor general Indira Jaising remarked, with admirable bluntness, that "independence can be undermined in different ways and one of them is offering post-retirement benefits immediately upon retirement." Even a former Chief Justice of India, Rajendra Lodha, declared on the day of his retirement that sitting judges should not covet government posts, because doing so requires them to "run after politicians." It takes a certain courage to say so — on one's last day, when running is no longer an option.

"Pre-retirement judges," observed Arun Jaitley, lawyer-turned-finance-minister, "are influenced by a desire for post-retirement jobs." He might have added: it is a desire that the government has every incentive to cultivate.

The natural experiment

Proving such a thing rigorously is another matter. The obvious objection is selection: perhaps the judges who rule in the government's favour and then receive government jobs are simply ideologically conservative — pro-state types who would have ruled the same way regardless of what was waiting for them after retirement. Correlation, as any first-year student learns, is not causation.

The authors are alive to this objection and deploy two quirks of India's institutional architecture to address it. First, since 1996, cases in the Supreme Court have been randomly allocated to two-judge benches by computer — a reform introduced to prevent the dark art of "bench hunting," whereby lawyers would manoeuvre for sympathetic judges. This random allocation means that whether a judge receives an important government case is unrelated to his personal characteristics. Second, a judge's retirement date is fixed entirely by his birthday, not by anything he does. Whether he retires long before or shortly before the next general election is therefore a matter of birth, not behaviour.

These two features, combined, allow the authors to construct a natural experiment. A judge who retires well before an election — say, more than 47 weeks — has a plausible "reward window": the sitting government has time to recognise and reciprocate a judge's helpfulness before it must face the electorate. A judge who retires just weeks before polling day has no such window: even if the government wanted to reward him, the new administration that takes over might not feel the same affection. The authors call the first group the "treatment" benches and the second the "control."

The numbers at a glance

·       652 Supreme Court judgments involving the Union of India, 1999–2014, form the study's sample

·       47 wks Average time for a retired judge to receive a post-SC government appointment — the threshold used to define the "reward window"

·       24–30 pp Increase in probability of the government winning an important case when one judge on the bench retires long before the election

·       29–39 pp Increase when both judges on the bench have a long reward window

·       13–17% Increase in likelihood of a post-SC job for each additional important case decided in the government's favour by the authoring judge

·       36% Share of judges in the sample who received a post-SC government appointment from the government in power at retirement

Important cases, important incentives

Crucially, the effect only shows up in important cases — those where the government deployed its most senior legal artillery, the attorney general or solicitor general, and where litigants hired large armies of expensive senior advocates. In run-of-the-mill cases, a judge's proximity to retirement makes no statistical difference. This makes intuitive sense: there is little point in currying favour with the government by ruling for it in a trifling dispute about a minor regulatory technicality. The game is worth playing only when the stakes — and the visibility — are high enough for the government to notice, remember and, in due course, reward.

Effect on government win probability

Increase in probability of government winning an important case, by bench composition

Control bench (both retire shortly before election)	~18%
One judge retires long before election	+24–30 pp
Both judges retire long before election	+29–39 pp

Source: Aney, Dam & Ko (2021). Estimates from OLS regressions with judge fixed effects and year dummies. Important case = 1 SD above mean importance.

The authors also find something suggestive about how judges pander, not merely whether they do. Each case on a two-judge bench produces a single written judgment, and the senior judge decides who authors it. The study finds that when a case is both important and won by the government, it is the judge with the longer reward window who disproportionately picks up the pen. Authoring a favourable judgment is more conspicuous than merely sitting on the bench — a signal, credible precisely because it is costly to a judge's reputation, that he is the sort of person the government might wish to retain.

Do judges get their reward?

The second half of the paper asks whether the government actually delivers. Here the authors find that authoring an important judgment in the government's favour increases a judge's probability of receiving a post-SC appointment by 13–17 percentage points per case. Being a non-authoring member of a winning bench? No significant effect. Losing important cases? Also no effect. The government, it seems, pays attention to names on judgments, not merely to outcomes.

To guard against the possibility that pro-government judges are simply rewarded because the government likes like-minded souls — rather than because it is intentionally corrupting the judiciary — the authors run an instrumental-variable regression. They instrument the number of favourable judgments a judge authored using the interaction of his retirement timing with the number of important cases he happened to be assigned. The results hold. Whether the government is deliberately buying rulings or merely selecting for compliant personalities, the incentive to pander is real and the reward is real. As the authors dryly note, the two possibilities are "observationally equivalent." Either way, post-SC jobs function as carrots.

The two systems — India and America — differ in where along the judicial career the executive applies its thumb. In America, the pressure comes at the appointment; in India, it comes at the retirement. The effect, however, may be similar.

A tale of two systems

The contrast with the United States is instructive. In America, the executive branch exerts influence over the Supreme Court chiefly through the appointment process — a noisy, politicised, nationally televised spectacle. Once confirmed, justices hold office for life, rendering them largely immune to the lure of future employment. In India, the appointment of Supreme Court judges is handled by the judiciary itself — a peculiar arrangement born of post-colonial anxiety about executive overreach. Consequently, the government cannot shape the bench through appointments. What it can do is shape the behaviour of serving judges through the prospect of what comes after.

Neither system is obviously superior. The American arrangement replaces one form of politicisation with another; the ideological battle simply moves upstream to the confirmation hearings. India's system creates a subtler, quieter form of influence — one that leaves no fingerprints and generates no Senate testimony. Corruption, in this sense, has adapted to the institutional constraints available to it. It is nothing if not resourceful.

What is to be done?

The authors are careful about what their study does and does not show. It is a statistical portrait of institutional behaviour, not an accusation against any individual judge. They make no claim that a particular ruling in a particular case was corrupt. The finding is aggregate: across the sample, judicial decisions shift in ways consistent with career-concern incentives. Some judges may pander consciously; others may rationalise their rulings in ways they sincerely believe are legally sound. The psyche of the corruptible is rarely simple.

The remedy suggested is structural rather than personal. The authors propose mechanical rules governing post-retirement appointments — mandatory waiting periods, transparent criteria, perhaps an independent appointments commission — that would sever the link between a judge's rulings and his subsequent employment. Several former Chief Justices have advocated cooling-off periods of two years or more. The government, which benefits from the current arrangement, has shown limited enthusiasm for the idea. This is, perhaps, unsurprising. Turkeys, as the saying goes, are not known for their love of Christmas.

In the meantime, the Supreme Court continues to hear cases of enormous consequence — tax disputes that move markets, constitutional questions that define civil liberties, environmental rulings that affect hundreds of millions. The judges who decide them are, in the main, learned and conscientious individuals. The problem identified by this paper is not that the Indian judiciary is staffed by rogues. It is that a well-designed institution can be slowly, quietly, almost imperceptibly bent by the gravitational pull of incentives. As the authors conclude: the prospect of a comfortable sinecure may be all it takes to tip the scales of justice — not dramatically, not in every case, but enough, and in the cases that matter most.

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This article draws on "Jobs for Justice(s): Corruption in the Supreme Court of India" by Madhav S. Aney, Shubhankar Dam and Giovanni Ko, published in the Journal of Law and Economics, Vol. 64 (August 2021), pp. 479–511. The study covers reported Supreme Court of India decisions between 1999 and 2014 involving the Union of India as a party, restricted to two-judge bench judgments with unambiguous outcomes.