“A judicial inquiry investigates, declares and enforces liabilities as they stand on present or past facts and under laws supposed already to exist. This is its purpose and end. Legislation, on the other hand, looks to the future and changes existing conditions by making a new rule, to be applied thereafter to all or some part of those subject to its power.”† 277. The Privy Council had occasion to consider this question in United Engineering Workers' Union v. Devanavagam, 1968 AC 356. The judgment of the majority was delivered by Lord Dilhorne. Lord Guest and Lord Devlin dissented. The question in the case was whether the President of a labour tribunal in Ceylon was the holder of a judicial office. If so as the man in question had not been appointed in the way the Constitution of Ceylon required for appointments of judicial officers, whether the tribunal was without jurisdiction. It is clear from the judgment of their Lordships of the minority that judicial power is the exercise of a power on the basis of preexisting law. At pp. 384-385, their Lordships said.' “Another characteristic of the judicial power is that it is concerned with existing rights that is, those which the parties actually have at the inception of the suit and not those which it may be thought they ought to have; it is concerned with the past and the present and not with the future.” 278. According to the historic analysis, the essence of the distinction between legislative power and judicial power is that the legislature makes new law which becomes binding on all persons over whom the legislature exercises legislative power: the judicature applies already existing law in the resolution of disputes between particular parties and Judges may not deviate from this duty. This view of the distinction between the obligation to apply and enforce rules and a discretion to modify rules or make new rules was at one time applied uncompromisingly in describing functions as legislative or judicial. Thus De Lolme said that courts of equity as then existing in England had a legislative function. They are he said, a kind of inferior experimental legislature continually employed in finding out and providing law remedies for those new species of cases for which neither the courts of common law nor the legislature have as yet found it convenient or practicable to establish any.† Though this would show that neither for logic nor in language has the boundary between legislation and adjudication ever been rigidly and clearly drawn, the distinction between the two is well established. 279. If, therefore, the decision of the amending body that the election of the appellant was valid was the result of the exercise of judicial power or of despotic discretion governed solely by considerations of political expediency, the question is whether that decision, though couched in the form of an enactment, can be characterized as an amendment of the Constitution. 280. The constituent power is the power to frame a constitution. The people of India, in the exercise of that power, framed the Constituton and it enacts the basic norms. By that instrument, the people conferred on the amending body the power to amend by way of addition variation or repeal any of its provisions (Artcle 368). It is not necessary to go in detail into the