The Calcutta Weekly Notes December 6 1948

They bring into sharp relief what is to our way of thinking a considerably disquieting phenomenon namely that in the eyes of the Executive in West Bengal (and also of the Legislture which has since incorporated into an amending Act the provisions in some cases more sharpened of the Governor’s Ordinance that proved the crux of the matter in the Full (Bench decision) there is in this province [...] The wings of the judciary however were clipped with a sudden blow that came from the Executive in the shape of an Ordinance at a time when the Full Bench was in seisin of the matter. [...] On this point acid comment was furnished by Chatterjee J.'s quotation from a pronouncement of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council:. it is the duty of the Executive in cases of doubt to ascertain the law in order to obey it and not to disregard it." The Executive in our province—backed obediently after the event by the Legilature—prevented cavalier fashion a Full Bench of t [...] Liberty. and the JudiciarThe State in its omnipotence has taken the matter out of the High Court's ambit and the judiciary therefore has no futher jurisdiction—such was the position to which to put it baldly and regretfully the Full Bench was reduced. [...] In the constitutional struggles of the seventeenth century the books and argments of Bracton and Fortescue were in the hands and on the lips of Sir Edward Coke and John Selden and all those who defended the old ideas of constitutional liberty against the new notion of divine right.