1979 (11) TMI 272

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....who with a significant word shakes the soul. Schiller, said Coleridge, burns a city to create his effect of terror: Shakespeare drops a handkerchief and freezes our blood. A.G. Gardiner, The Pillars of Society, p. 106 For this exquisite reason, brevity is the soul of art and justicing including judgment-writing, must practise the art of brevity, especially where no great issue of legal moment compels long exposition. Therefore, we mean to be brief to the bare bones, with a few facts here and a brief expression of law there, by adopting the technique which "is simply the perfect economy of means to an end". For another reason also the need for parsimony exists. The court is in crisis, docket-logged and fatigued. A judgment can be b....

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....ed but some months later the plaintiff paid the mortgage money to the mortgagee bank; and took an assignment of its rights and got herself impleaded as second plaintiff in the suit which, by then, had been instituted by the bank against the present defendant (O.S. No. 154 of 1968). Eventually, the mortgage suit resulted in a decree in favour of the present plaintiff (second plaintiff therein); and the amount now due has, by now, swollen to around ₹ 11 lakhs or so. 3. An appeal had been carried by the plaintiff-appellant to a Division Bench of the High Court which rejected most of her contentions except one. The court, while affirming that the direction to make a deposit into court within three months was valid, vacated the default cl....

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....alse pleas raised in the course of the suit by him and rightly negatived. Nor are we convinced that the application for consideration and extension of time cannot be read, as in substance it is, as a petition for more time to deposit. Even so, specific performance is an equitable relief and he who seeks equity can be put on terms to ensure that equity is done to the opposite party even while granting the relief. The final end of law is justice, and so the means to it too should be informed by equity. That is why he who seeks equity shall do equity. Here, the assignment of the mortgage is not a guideless discharge of the vendor's debt as implied in the agreement to sell but a disingenuous disguise to arm herself with a mortgage decree t....

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....pellant may be allowed to deposit the amount due under the agreement, viz., ₹ 3,45,000 together with interest at 11 per cent, from April 1967 upto date, the mortgage decree in her favour must be extinguished, save to the extent of the cash then paid. The High Court expressed a slightly drastic though similar view, somewhat loosely, thus: After we have expressed our opinion and dictated this order, the learned Counsel for the Plaintiff orally requests us to permit the Plaintiff to deposit the entire amount as directed by the learned trial Judge in the Court. Having regard to the fact that no such stand was taken at any earlier stage and this request has been orally made only after we have dictated this order, we do not see any justif....