The scene behind the judgment
Every year-end review of the Supreme Court's work — its Constitution Bench rulings, its ten most-cited judgments, its list of the next eight Chief Justices through to 2033 — assumes something that most readers never pause on: that the judges who write these judgments got there through a settled, lawful process. In 2025, as one Chief Justice handed over to another and commentators began mapping out who will hold that office years into the future, the process by which that handover happens quietly did its work again. No election was held. No legislature voted. A small group of senior judges recommended a name, and the President of India issued a warrant of appointment. This is the collegium system, and it is one of the most consequential pieces of constitutional law that the text of the Constitution itself never mentions.
What happened
2025 saw the customary transition in the office of Chief Justice of India, following the convention by which the senior-most judge of the Supreme Court succeeds to that post, and a wave of retrospectives cataloguing the outgoing and incoming Chief Justices' notable judgments. Alongside this, the year's roundups of Constitution Bench decisions and the ordinary business of appointing and transferring judges to the Supreme Court and the various High Courts proceeded, as they do every year, through recommendations made by collegiums of sitting judges rather than through any statute passed by Parliament. This may seem like routine institutional housekeeping, but it is worth pausing on precisely because it is not what the Constitution's drafters wrote down. The word "collegium" appears nowhere in the constitutional text. It is a judicial invention, built up over three landmark rulings, and it remains one of the few instances in Indian constitutional practice where the judiciary designed and continues to control the very process by which its own membership is decided.
The law behind it
The starting point is Article 124 of the Constitution, which establishes the Supreme Court and lays down how its judges are appointed. It provides that every Judge of the Supreme Court is appointed by the President by warrant under his hand and seal, and that in the case of appointments other than the Chief Justice, the President is to act after consultation with the Chief Justice of India and such other judges as he may deem necessary. For High Court judges, the equivalent provision is Article 217, which similarly speaks of consultation with the Chief Justice of India, the Governor of the State, and, in the case of appointments other than the Chief Justice of the High Court, the Chief Justice of that High Court. Article 222 deals with the related but distinct power to transfer a judge from one High Court to another, again after consultation with the Chief Justice of India.
Read literally, these provisions describe a system of executive appointment tempered by consultation — the President, acting on the advice of the Council of Ministers, decides, and the judiciary is consulted. That literal reading held sway for the Constitution's first three decades. It was only through a sequence of Supreme Court judgments interpreting the word "consultation" that the meaning of these Articles was transformed. The Court eventually read "consultation" as requiring something close to concurrence — meaning the executive could not appoint a candidate against the considered recommendation of the Chief Justice of India acting collectively with senior colleagues. That collective recommending body is what came to be called the collegium: for Supreme Court appointments, the Chief Justice of India together with the four senior-most judges of the Court; for High Court appointments, a similar mechanism involving the Chief Justice of India, senior Supreme Court judges, and the concerned High Court's own collegium.
This judge-made structure is inseparable from a second, larger doctrine: the basic structure doctrine, under which certain features of the Constitution — including the independence of the judiciary — are held to be beyond the reach of Parliament's ordinary amending power under Article 368. It was this doctrine that proved decisive when Parliament attempted to replace judicial primacy in appointments with a body called the National Judicial Appointments Commission, which would have included the Law Minister and eminent persons alongside judges. The constitutional amendment creating that commission was struck down by the Supreme Court as violative of the basic structure, on the ground that it compromised judicial independence — a value the Court traced back to provisions such as Article 50, which directs the State to separate the judiciary from the executive in public services, and to the binding authority the Supreme Court's own pronouncements carry under Article 141. The result is that, today, the collegium remains the operative mechanism, governed not by the bare text of Articles 124 and 217 but by the accumulated case law interpreting them, supplemented by an executive-judiciary understanding called the Memorandum of Procedure that fills in practical details the judgments left open.
How we got here
The story runs through three widely studied phases. In the earliest years after independence, "consultation" under Articles 124 and 217 was read as advisory only — the executive could differ from the Chief Justice of India's view, and often did, particularly in matters of transfers and supersession of senior judges for the office of Chief Justice. This executive-primacy phase generated considerable public disquiet about political interference in judicial appointments, especially around instances where seniority was bypassed for perceived proximity to the government of the day. In response, the Supreme Court reinterpreted the consultation requirement to mean effective concurrence, placing the primary voice in the hands of the Chief Justice of India acting collectively with senior colleagues rather than alone. A subsequent clarificatory ruling, delivered in response to a Presidential reference seeking guidance on the process, expanded this collective body to a plural collegium and laid down the now-familiar structure of consultation with a defined number of senior judges for both the Supreme Court and the High Courts. Decades later, when Parliament and the Executive sought to formalise a role for the political branches through a constitutional amendment establishing the National Judicial Appointments Commission, the Court invoked the basic structure doctrine to strike it down, reaffirming judicial primacy in appointments as an essential feature of judicial independence that Parliament's amending power under Article 368 cannot touch.
What it means in practice
For the ordinary citizen, the practical effect is that the judge who eventually decides their case — whether on a property dispute, a criminal appeal, or a challenge to a government notification — reached the Bench through a process largely internal to the judiciary, with the President's role reduced to formalising a recommendation rather than independently choosing among candidates. For lawyers and litigants, this matters because it shapes debates about diversity on the Bench, transparency of criteria, and accountability — since collegium deliberations are not publicly reasoned in the way judgments are. For UPSC and judiciary aspirants, the collegium system is a recurring examination staple precisely because it sits at the intersection of textual interpretation (what does "consultation" mean), structural doctrine (basic structure and judicial independence), and institutional design (why an amendment enjoying Parliament's assent could still be struck down). Understanding Articles 124, 217 and 222 alongside the basic structure doctrine, rather than any single case name in isolation, is what allows a candidate to answer both the constitutional-law question and the current-affairs question the same year's headlines will inevitably pose.
What to watch
The collegium system remains a live subject of institutional debate rather than a settled question. Calls periodically resurface — from within Parliament, the Bar, and occasionally from sitting judges themselves — for greater transparency in collegium resolutions, for a revised Memorandum of Procedure, or for some form of institutionalised executive input that would not fall foul of the basic structure doctrine as previously interpreted. No fresh constitutional amendment or legislative proposal on this front has yet reached the point of enactment. Readers should treat any claim that the system is about to be overhauled with caution until a specific bill, amendment, or fresh constitutional bench ruling actually materialises; until then, appointments to the Supreme Court and High Courts will continue to proceed exactly as they have for three decades — through Articles 124 and 217, read through the lens of judicial interpretation rather than their bare text.