Supreme Court Justice Yasantha Kodagoda, PC, has told Sri Lanka’s legal profession that its reflex to take disputes to court is a significant cause of judicial congestion, and that close to nine in ten disputes could be settled without a courtroom.
“Nearly 90 percent of disputes faced by individuals, organizations and corporate entities can be resolved effectively through alternative means of dispute resolution,” Kodagoda said in remarks reported by NewsFirst.
He said clogged courts are not a Sri Lankan problem alone. “We live in an era where not only in Sri Lanka, but in many other countries as well, courts are inundated with cases. The issue of clogged court systems and delays in the administration of justice has become a national concern requiring intervention at multiple levels.”
Where he located the cause
Kodagoda said one of the key reasons is the tendency among legal professionals to resort instinctively to litigation, treating courtroom adjudication as the primary or superior route to a resolution. Legal education, he said, has traditionally placed judicial adjudication at the apex of dispute resolution, leading generations of lawyers and academics to view negotiation, mediation, conciliation and arbitration as secondary options.
Evidence and user-satisfaction studies increasingly show those mechanisms are not weaker substitutes and can produce outcomes that are as effective or more beneficial for the parties, he argued. He said the profession should stop treating them as alternatives at all, and recognise them as appropriate — often preferable — forms of dispute resolution in their own right.
He drew a line around what still belongs in court: complex commercial disputes and criminal cases require judicial intervention and formal adjudication. The great majority of disputes, he said, do not.
A widened diagnosis
The emphasis differs from the one Kodagoda gave in May. Addressing the Bar Association’s 52nd Convocation, he called delay the “slow poison of our entire system of justice” but said practising lawyers were not primarily responsible for it — most, he said then, were ready to argue cases or lead evidence, and the bottleneck lay with the courts. “The problem lies primarily in the sheer unbearable volume of work that all of us have to handle and the limited infrastructure-related and human-resource capacity of the system of justice,” he said in May.
The two positions are not strictly contradictory. May’s remarks concerned the pace at which filed cases move; Friday’s concern the decision to file at all. Taken together they widen the diagnosis from a capacity shortfall to include the profession’s own default settings — a pointed message to deliver to lawyers.
The numbers behind it
The Ministry of Justice recorded 1,134,474 cases pending across 293 courts as of 30 June 2025, with magistrate’s courts holding 72 per cent of the load.
Sri Lanka already diverts a substantial share of disputes away from that system. Justice Minister Harshana Nanayakkara said this month that the Mediation Boards handle more than 200,000 disputes a year, with Rs. 800 million allocated to the Mediation Boards Commission and land boards now operating in all 25 districts. On Kodagoda’s estimate, the scope for diversion is far larger still.
NewsFirst did not name the event at which the judge was speaking, and no other verified newsroom had carried the remarks at the time of writing.
