Institutions are not peripheral supports erected around economic growth but the very architecture upon which enduring prosperity is constructed, Chief Justice of India Surya Kant said on Saturday, as he called for greater jurisprudential engagement and judicial cooperation among BRICS+ nations.
Delivering the inaugural address at the 11th BRICS+ Legal Forum, organised by the Bar Association of India, the CJI said the theme of the conference”Rule of Law Frameworks and Institutional Capacity Building for Economic Resilience, Innovation and Sustainability”had placed before the legal fraternity a question of particular urgency.
The economic ascent of nations, he observed, cannot be attributed merely to favourable geography or an abundance of natural resources. Sustainable growth is instead the product of institutions that command public confidence and possess the capacity to enforce rights, secure obligations and provide certainty to those who transact within the economy.
Recalling a conversation with a foreign judge who had remarked that the Indian justice system had learnt to “speak the language of the Rule of Law and the language of economy in the same sentence”, the CJI said such institutional fluency had not emerged by accident. It was the consequence of deliberate capacity-building and a sustained recognition that the administration of justice and economic development are intrinsically interlinked.
With BRICS+ countries collectively representing more than 40 per cent of the world’s population and accounting for nearly 40 per cent of global output in purchasing power parity terms, the CJI said the grouping possessed an extraordinary opportunity to shape the legal and institutional vocabulary of the emerging global economic order.
Against this backdrop, he noted India’s continuing economic momentum and observed that the country’s progress owed much to the character and resilience of its institutions, with the judiciary occupying a central position in the broader constitutional framework.
Seeking to encapsulate the relationship between the Rule of Law and economic confidence, the CJI coined the expression “Nyaya-nomics”or, as he described it, the economics of justice.
The idea, he explained, rests on a simple but consequential proposition: institutions do not constitute scaffolding that can be added once growth has already taken root. They are the foundational design that makes growth sustainable in the first place. Remove that institutional architecture, he cautioned, and apparent economic success may prove to be little more than accumulated good fortune vulnerable to its first serious disruption.
For any modern economy, he said, a credible legal system furnishes three indispensable assurances trust, predictability and stability. It is these attributes that allow commerce to flourish, investments to travel across jurisdictions and contractual relationships to survive periods of uncertainty.
The CJI traced this evolution through the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence on arbitration and commercial law, where the Court has progressively sought to reconcile doctrinal precision with commercial realities. Referring to decisions including Bharat Aluminium Co. v. Kaiser Aluminium Technical Services Inc., PASL Wind Solutions Pvt. Ltd. v. GE Power Conversion India Pvt. Ltd., Cox and Kings Ltd. v. SAP India Pvt. Ltd. and the seven-judge Bench ruling concerning the interplay between arbitration agreements and stamp duty, he highlighted the Court’s emphasis on party autonomy, jurisdictional certainty and the preservation of genuine commercial intent.
The underlying judicial philosophy, he suggested, was that form must not be permitted to defeat substance, nor procedural technicalities allowed to unravel obligations that contracting parties had consciously undertaken. A legal system that respects commercial autonomy, while remaining anchored in the discipline of law, strengthens the confidence upon which economic activity depends.
Turning to insolvency, the CJI underlined the economic consequences of delayed adjudication. Capital, he observed, derives value from circulation. Capital that is efficiently recycled can re-enter the productive economy, whereas capital immobilised in prolonged litigation may lose both its utility and its capacity to generate further economic activity.
The address also looked beyond domestic institutional reform towards a framework of deeper legal cooperation within the BRICS+ grouping.
The CJI proposed the creation of a BRICS+ Judicial Fellowship, under which early-career judges could gain exposure to the functioning of courts across member jurisdictions. Such an initiative, he suggested, could foster a deeper understanding of different legal traditions while encouraging the exchange of judicial ideas and institutional practices.
He also advocated the establishment of a shared jurisprudence repository, drawing upon India’s experience with the digitisation and accessibility of case law. The objective would be to create a mechanism through which judicial reasoning developed in one BRICS+ jurisdiction could inform courts in another without having to wait for years before entering the wider legal discourse.
For this proposed framework of judicial collaboration, the CJI offered another expression the “Nyaya Setu”, or a Bridge of Justice envisaging it as a connective institutional framework among the diverse legal traditions represented within the BRICS+ fold.
The idea, he said, was not to homogenise distinct legal systems but to create channels through which trust, knowledge and jurisprudential experience could travel more freely across jurisdictions.
Concluding his address, the CJI located the Rule of Law at the heart of economic resilience. The true measure of a nation’s economic strength, he suggested, would not lie merely in the resources beneath its territory, but in the credibility of the institutions governing the commitments made within it.
In an increasingly interconnected global economy, the CJI’s message was unequivocal: the nations best positioned to command lasting economic confidence will be those where contractual promises are enforceable, institutions remain dependable and courts ensure that the faith reposed in the legal system is not left without remedy.
For, as he put it, the strongest economies of the century may ultimately be those whose courts and institutions honour every promise made above the ground.
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