are patently frivolous and many others never enforced, is not PIL a device for the judiciary to expand its own powers and autonomy under the mantle of a popular social justice agenda? A separate set of questions involves the beneficiaries of PIL: Do PIL cases continue to benefit the poor and disadvantaged, or have not lifestyle issues and middle class concerns become predominant in PIL cases? Are not judges manifestly less disposed to the interests of the poor and marginalized than they were two decades ago, during the “heroic” years when PIL originated?

These queries regarding PIL are fundamentally normative claims, and are based on principled understandings of the role of judges and courts in India’s democracy. At the same time, the validity of some of them rests on facts, albeit complex ones. For instance, the challenge related to separation of powers raises questions about judicial capacity – critics charge that courts cannot monitor and supervise complex “polycentric disputes” (Fuller & Winston, 1978, p. 304), whereas others respond that they can, or at least as well as parliaments can (A. K. Thiruvengadam, 2009). The relative effectiveness of judicial supervision, if observed accurately and at scale, could help resolve this disagreement, at least for a subset of cases and in certain contexts. Similarly, whether or not PIL cases still address the concerns of the poor, and whether decisions are as supportive of their interests as in the past, are empirical questions. To date, the debate over PIL has largely been abstract (with some exceptions, to be described below). It has helped generate a set of normatively significant questions, but at this stage of the research cycle, empirical work may be more pressing. This paper contributes to that task by assessing PIL with empirical data.

The next section of this paper analyzes the argument that PIL constitutes a case of judicial overreach. The contention that PIL weakens policy formulation and implementation in the legislative and executive branches is typically “dressed up” as a separation of powers concern, but a more apt framework involves an assessment of the impact of PIL on sectoral governance, which is fundamentally an empirical matter, not a doctrinal one. The following section describes the charge that PIL favors middle class interests rather than the concerns of the poor and marginalized. That section than presents estimates , based on original data taken from Supreme Court records an online legal database, to assess that claim.

# _Public Interest Litigation: Is the Judiciary Overreaching?_

An old-fashioned view of legal rights holds that most social and economic matters do not involve genuine rights because they require positive actions, not merely restraint, and have no single, identifiable duty holder. Positive obligations, moreover, entail significant expenditures that are the purview of the other branches of government. Courts, therefore, should steer clear of the social, economic, and environmental concerns at the heart of PIL. More contemporary views (Holmes & Sunstein, 1999; Shue, 1996) hold that “for their fulfillment all rights require restraint, protection, and aid from the entity from 3