New Delhi, Oct. 26 -- The Supreme Court had more than 1,000 cases marked as "sensitive" that were kept off its regular cause lists, a practice that exposed how the Chief Justice of India's control over case allocation and listing could determine which matters came up for hearing, former top court judge Sanjay Kishan Kaul has written in his memoir "Without Fear or Favour", crediting Justice Uday U Lalit with changing that approach during his brief tenure as the CJI. Justice Kaul's account of Justice Lalit's tenure, which lasted less than three months in 2022, offers an insight into how administrative decisions at the top of the judiciary can shape access to justice. Justice Lalit, Kaul writes, began assigning cases that had previously been marked "sensitive" and left unlisted during Justice NV Ramana's tenure as CJI, bringing them back into judicial process. The episode also highlights the extraordinary influence the CJI wields over the Supreme Court's functioning, not only through the constitution of benches and allocation of cases, but also through decisions on what gets listed for hearing. "This discretionary and almost arbitrary power had grown to unreasonable proportions by the time Justice Lalit took over. Over 1,000 cases lay unlisted. It was impossible to tell why on earth some of those matters had been marked as sensitive when they were positively mundane. It was Chief Justice Lalit who began to assign some of these matters," writes Justice Kaul. To be sure, the CJI, as "master of the roster", has the administrative authority to allocate cases to benches and determine their listing in the top court, giving the office considerable influence over which matters come up for hearing and when. Justice Lalit's approach was part of a wider effort to address a long-standing backlog of important cases, the memoir highlights. On his first day as CJI, he convened a full-court meeting and moved to constitute six Constitution benches of five judges each to hear 30 pending matters. Justice Kaul noted that no Constitution bench had been constituted during the tenure of Justice Lalit's predecessor, Justice Ramana....