Golaknath v. State of Punjab (1967)

It is the Indian origin of prospective overruling, and prospective overruling is the one doctrine in this paper where a court borrows the posture of a statute. Ordinarily a judicial decision declares what the law always was, and so operates backwards; a statute, by contrast, is prima facie prospective unless it is expressly or by necessary implication made retrospective. Prospective overruling gives a judgment the statutory posture, so that concluded matters are not reopened.

That is why it sits in a paper on interpretation rather than only in constitutional law. It is the answer to the practical difficulty created whenever a court overrules a settled view: transactions and decisions already completed on the faith of the old view are suddenly wrong.

The question was whether a Constitution Amendment Act is "law" for the purposes of Article 13, which makes laws inconsistent with fundamental rights void. Three amendments were in issue — the First, Fourth and Seventeenth Constitution Amendment Acts — and rights and transactions had been ordered under them for years.

"Law" in Article 13 includes a Constitution Amendment Act. Since a law against the Constitution is void, the First, Fourth and Seventeenth Constitution Amendment Acts were held void, and Parliament was held to have no power to amend Part III.

The Court then applied prospective overruling to save the situation: the amendments already made were not disturbed by the declaration.

The technique is stated simply. The court declares the new position of law but directs that its decision shall operate only for the future, so that concluded matters are not reopened. The declaration and its temporal reach are separated, and the court controls the second.

The method is worth learning in its modern, more ordinary applications, because those are what a problem question will look like:

• In Indra Sawhney v. Union of India the Supreme Court held that Article 16(4) does not permit reservation in the matter of promotion, and then directed: "This rule shall, however, have only prospective operation and shall not affect the promotions already made, whether made on regular basis or on any other basis. We direct that our decision on this question shall operate only prospectively and shall not affect promotions already made, whether on temporary, officiating or regular/permanent basis." Existing promotional reservations were allowed to continue for a period of five years so that the authorities could revise the rules.
• Outside the constitutional field, overruling two earlier decisions on the effect of quashing a declaration under the Land Acquisition Act, the Court accepted that there was substance in the plea that matters which had attained finality should not be reopened, and held: "The present judgment shall operate prospectively to the extent that cases where awards have been made and the compensations have been paid, shall not be reopened, by applying the ratio of the present judgment."

Both show the shape of the direction: identify the class of completed transactions, and exclude it expressly from the new rule.

What happened to the substantive holding. The Twenty-fourth Amendment then declared that Parliament has the power to amend any part of the Constitution including Part III, and in Kesavananda Bharati (1973) Golaknath was overruled, the Court holding that Parliament may amend any Article subject to the basic structure principle. The substantive proposition about Article 13 is therefore no longer the law; what survives, and what this paper examines, is the interpretive technique.

It opens any question on prospective overruling, and it is a useful contrast in a question on the presumption against retrospectivity: a statute is presumed prospective, a judgment is presumed retrospective, and prospective overruling is the judicial correction of that asymmetry.

It disposes of the objection that a court cannot change the law without unsettling everything done under the old understanding.

It does not decide — not any longer — that Parliament cannot amend Part III; say so expressly, because an answer that states Golaknath's constitutional holding as current law is wrong after Kesavananda Bharati. It is also a device of the Supreme Court, and the conditions on which it may be exercised are settled by decisions this course does not set out; state the rule and the illustrations, and do not invent the conditions.