Saroop Chand's Case

Saroop Chand gives the principle that the whole run of litigation is really about: nemo judex in causa sua. The Supreme Council was at once the claimant for the revenue and the body deciding whether the revenue was due. Every other case in the group is an application of that objection; this is the case that states it.

It is also the second half of the habeas corpus pair. Read with Kamaluddin's Case, it shows how the court used personal liberty as the doorway into revenue administration — a doorway the Act of Settlement 1781 then closed.

Saroop Chand was a surety for payment of the revenue of a pargana, and disputed the liability. He was separately owed money in his capacity as treasurer of a division. He claimed to have paid Rs 10,000 to a member of the Council, which that member denied.

He was committed to prison for non-payment, and a petition for habeas corpus was filed in the Supreme Court.

The court held that the imprisonment was arbitrary, and Saroop Chand was released.

On the liability arising in his capacity as treasurer, the court held that this was a matter of contract; and it held that the Council had acted like a judge in its own cause and had decided its own demands of the revenue.

The steps are reusable and should be set out as a method:

1. Characterise the liability. A surety's undertaking, and a treasurer's account, are obligations arising from agreement. They are matters of contract, triable as such, not administrative facts that a collector may simply assert.
2. Ask who decided. The demand was the Council's own, and the Council decided that the demand was due.
3. Apply the disqualification. A body that is party to a claim cannot be the tribunal that determines it; deciding its own demands of the revenue is acting as judge in its own cause.
4. Take the consequence for the detention. If the determination that founded the committal is vitiated, the imprisonment that rests on it is arbitrary, and habeas corpus lies.

Notice that step 1 is what lets the court in. By finding a contractual question, it avoids the Council's standing objection that revenue is closed to the court.

Cite it for nemo judex in causa sua whenever the question asks what was wrong with the fusion of revenue and judicial power. It is the exact authority for the structural vice of Warren Hastings's judicial plan of 1772, under which the officer who collected the revenue also judged the suits — the fusion separated again in the mofussil in 1780 and carried further by Cornwallis.

Pair it with Kamaluddin's Case as the two habeas corpus decisions, and use the pair to show that the early conflict was about personal liberty and procedure rather than about revenue as a subject-matter.

Use it in Module III as the historical root of the modern separation of powers and of the rule of law: the objection that nobody may judge his own cause survives into Art. 50 and into the devices securing judicial independence.

It disposes of any argument that the Council's revenue determinations were unexaminable merely because they were labelled revenue.

What it does not decide: it does not decide whether the Company in its revenue capacity was generally amenable to the court, and it gave no relief against the Council itself. The Act of Settlement 1781 then provided that the Supreme Court was not to have jurisdiction over revenue matters, which reverses the practical effect of this decision and of Kamaluddin together.