You’ve probably seen that viral claim — an Indian judge wrote his entire verdict in poetry in 2016, and a higher court upheld it. Here’s the uncomfortable truth: nobody can actually find that case.
Not on LiveLaw. Not on Bar & Bench. Not on the Supreme Court of India’s official website. The case name? Unknown. The citation? Unknown. The judge? Unknown. This story has spread across Indian legal Twitter and WhatsApp groups for years — and it might be almost entirely a myth.
So what actually happened with Indian judges and poetry? The real story is stranger, warmer, and honestly more interesting than the viral version.
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The Indian Judge Poetry Verdict You Were Sold — And Why It Doesn’t Exist
Here’s a question for you: have you ever checked the source when you shared something that sounded too cool to be true?
The closest verified story traces back to 2016 — but it’s nothing like what gets shared online. A judge named Bharat Chugh was presiding over a Railway Court. A teenager appeared before him, charged with selling tea on trains without a licence. Think about that for a second. A kid, just trying to earn something, hauled into a courtroom.
Chugh was moved. He wrote a poem — titled “Tea Seller and Judge” — as a personal reflection inspired by that boy’s case. It was a private, human response to an absurd situation. It was never the judgment itself. Chugh later made his own position crystal clear: writing an entire judgment in verse is “not something I find acceptable,” though he acknowledged that judges elsewhere in the world have tried it “with great style.”
That’s the source of the myth. A private poem by a moved judge, somewhere between 2016 and the internet’s imagination, became “Indian judge writes entire verdict in poetry.”
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When Indian Courtrooms Actually Did Touch Poetry
Now here’s the counter-intuitive part: Indian judges using poetry in their verdicts is completely real — just not the way the viral story describes it.
Some verified examples from Indian legal history:
- In 2011, while deciding the landmark euthanasia case Aruna Shanbaug v. Union of India, Justice Markandey Katju opened his 141-page judgment by quoting the 18th-century Urdu poet Mirza Ghalib. One couplet, setting the emotional tone for a ruling about life, death, and dignity.
- The Bombay High Court, as far back as 1924, grounded the principle of vicarious liability in the concluding line of John Milton’s sonnet “On His Blindness.”
- In Shanti Bhushan vs. Commissioner of Income Tax (2011) and Munavvar-ul-Islam vs. Rishu Arora (2014), Indian courts wove Urdu verse into their reasoning.
- A 2019 order by Additional Sessions Judge Mohd Farrukh — in a case involving a woman fired from her job for extending her maternity leave — cited multiple celebrity quotes to humanise the judgment.
What’s happening here isn’t judges showing off. It’s judges trying to reach people. Many of the readers of a judgment are laypersons — the parties themselves, their families, ordinary Indians who have no legal training. A line of Ghalib lands differently than a subsection reference.
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The American Case That Probably Started the Confusion
This is where the trail gets interesting.
In the United States, a court actually did deliver an entire decision in verse. In Fisher v. Lowe (333 N.W.2d 67), a Michigan court wrote its ruling in the style of poet Joyce Kilmer — rhymes, metre, the whole thing. The Michigan Court of Appeals upheld it.
This is a real, verified case. It exists. It is cited in legal curiosity lists worldwide, including on LiveLaw’s coverage of poetry in Indian court judgments.
Somewhere along the way, the Indian internet appears to have borrowed this story, swapped Michigan for an unnamed Indian court, and called it 2016.
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So What Should You Do With a Viral Legal Story?
Ask yourself these three things before you share:
- Is there a case name and citation — something like Aruna Shanbaug v. Union of India, (2011) 4 SCC 454?
- Can you find it on LiveLaw, Bar & Bench, or the Supreme Court’s own website?
- Is the person sharing it a legal journalist, or just someone with a great thumbnail?
If the answer to all three is no, you’re probably looking at a conflation — real ingredients, fictional dish.
For more stories where the verified truth is wilder than the myth, read more legal curiosities on thecourtroom.in.
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The real story here isn’t a judge who wrote poetry. It’s a system — often cold, often overwhelming — where individual judges occasionally reach for Ghalib or Milton because they haven’t forgotten that a human being is reading their words. That’s quietly remarkable. And it didn’t need a fake case citation to be worth telling.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice.
