Epistolary jurisdiction
Also called: Letter petition · Topic: Judiciary: Independence, Structure, Judicial Review and Activism · NCERT: Class 11, Ch 6 "Judiciary"
Meaning
Epistolary jurisdiction means the court treating a letter or postcard as a writ petition. "Epistle" means letter. It allowed poor people and prisoners, who could not afford lawyers or formal petitions, to reach the Supreme Court. It grew in the late 1970s and 1980s as part of public interest litigation (PIL).
Example
In the Sunil Batra case (1980), a Tihar jail prisoner wrote a note to Justice Krishna Iyer about torture in jail, and the court treated it as a petition. NCERT says the practice was abandoned. In fact, letters are now screened under the Supreme Court's PIL guidelines of 1988 before they can be treated as petitions.
Don't confuse with
- Suo motu cognizance: here the court takes up a matter entirely on its own, for example from news reports. In epistolary jurisdiction, someone writes a letter that becomes the petition.
Related concepts
- Judicial activism
- Public interest litigation
- Locus standi
- Hussainara Khatoon case
- Sunil Batra case
- Bandhua Mukti Morcha case
- Suo motu cognizance
- Amicus curiae