| Abstract |
The Constitution of India under Article 142 grants the Supreme Court of India with broad inherent powers to do complete justice. The contours of this inherent power and what it means to achieve complete justice were left to the Supreme Court to determine itself. In this paper, we empirically examine all the Supreme Court cases from its inception in 1950 till 2023 which use the term "Article 142" or "Complete Justice" We found 1579 cases, which were then hand-coding for many variables such as the nature of the case, where the case was appealed from, the temporal distribution, the laws involved, the nature of the issue, the judges involved, among others. The paper examines when and how the Supreme Court wields its inherent powers, generating various insights and exploring trends. |