Supreme Court begins 'experiment' with four special benches to clear its oldest civil and criminal appeals

Verified key facts

• Four special benches began functioning in the Supreme Court from 15 July 2026 to hear only its oldest pending appeals.
• Benches led by Justices P.K. Mishra and S.V.N. Bhatti take the oldest civil matters; Justices Manoj Misra and Ujjal Bhuyan take the oldest criminal matters.
• Nearly 800 long-pending matters have been identified for priority adjudication, The Federal reported.
• CJI Surya Kant has called the initiative 'probably a first' and described it as an experiment whose results will decide its future.

Four benches, one target: the oldest files on the docket

The Supreme Court has constituted four special benches to hear nothing except its oldest pending civil and criminal appeals. Chief Justice of India Surya Kant has described the move as an experiment without precedent in the court's history. The benches began functioning on 15 July, according to LiveLaw's daily round-up of proceedings, and will sit in this configuration on regular hearing days.

Two benches, headed by Justice P.K. Mishra and Justice S.V.N. Bhatti, will deal exclusively with the oldest civil matters. Two others, led by Justice Manoj Misra and Justice Ujjal Bhuyan, will take up the oldest criminal appeals. India Legal reported that all four benches will sit on non-miscellaneous days, the slots the court ordinarily reserves for regular appeals rather than fresh filings.

The court has identified nearly 800 long-pending matters for priority adjudication, The Federal reported. Listing will be strictly chronological. The oldest civil appeal on the docket will appear at serial number one on its board. The oldest criminal appeal will likewise lead the list before the criminal benches, with no queue-jumping by newer or better-lawyered files.

Why the Chief Justice calls it an experiment

Justice Kant has called the initiative 'probably a first' for the institution. He has framed it as a trial run, saying its success will determine whether future Chief Justices continue with the model, according to The Federal. The candour is striking. Court-reform announcements in India rarely arrive with a built-in admission that the reform might not survive its author's tenure.

The design responds to a structural bias in the court's listing system. Fresh special leave petitions and urgent miscellaneous matters dominate judicial time in Delhi. Regular appeals, once admitted, can drift for a decade or more without a full hearing. Dedicated benches remove the daily competition for judicial attention, a contest that old appeals almost always lose.

Part of a wider push on pendency

The four-bench plan is one strand of a broader backlog strategy under the current Chief Justice. The court has also registered a suo motu case over delays in appointments to the National Company Law Tribunal and its infrastructure gaps, which came up for hearing on 14 July, LiveLaw reported. Institutional delay, in other words, is now being treated by the court as a judicial question in its own right.

Legal-education portals tracking the court, including GS Times, note that the initiative is explicitly linked to reducing decades-old litigation rather than headline disposal statistics. Separately, the court's Artificial Intelligence Committee has drafted regulations for the responsible use of AI in courts, according to reports in legal and current-affairs media. Modernisation and backlog clearance are proceeding on parallel tracks.

The human cost of decades-old appeals

Old criminal appeals carry particular human costs. Convicts can serve large portions of their sentences before their appeals are ever heard, making eventual acquittals hollow. Civil litigants may wait a generation for property, tenancy and land acquisition disputes to conclude. Chronological listing is a blunt instrument, but it directly rewards the people who have waited longest for a hearing.

There is a quieter institutional cost as well. Files that sit for twenty years become harder to decide, not easier. Records go missing and must be reconstructed. Original counsel retire or die, and successors must learn the brief from scratch. Witnesses in connected proceedings become untraceable. Every year of delay adds friction that further slows eventual disposal.

What dedicated benches can and cannot fix

Special benches can accelerate outcomes only if the rest of the system cooperates. Lawyers must actually be ready in decades-old files. Registries must ensure complete paper books. Adjournments, the routine killer of listing reforms, will need to be refused with consistency that the court has not always shown. None of this is guaranteed by a notification alone.

There is also a throughput question. Four benches sitting on limited days can decide only a fraction of 800 matters in a single term. The experiment's real value may lie less in raw numbers than in proving that chronological justice is administratively possible inside India's most overloaded constitutional court.

Old civil files also hide settlement opportunities. Parties who fought bitterly in the 1990s may now prefer closure to victory, especially where the original protagonists have died. Judges on the civil benches can use that reality, nudging compromise where a dispute has outlived its economics. Every settled appeal frees hearing time for one that genuinely needs adjudication.

What to watch next

The Chief Justice has said the model will be judged on results. Three signals will matter most over the coming months.

• Disposal rates of the four benches through the current term, and whether the identified 800 matters shrink visibly.
• Adjournment discipline: whether old files are heard on the day they are listed.
• Continuity: whether successor Chief Justices retain, expand or quietly retire the arrangement.

For an institution often accused of privileging the urgent over the important, this is a public commitment to the opposite. Its fate now depends on sustained judicial time, cooperative counsel and the unglamorous work of closing files older than the careers of many lawyers who will argue them.

Sources

• The Federal - Supreme Court to set up four benches for hearing oldest pending cases (July 2026)
• India Legal - CJI Surya Kant constitutes special benches for oldest pending matters (July 2026)
• LiveLaw - Supreme Court Daily Round-Up, July 14, 2026
• GS Times - CJI forms four dedicated benches for oldest pending cases (July 2026)