The court was established as the High Court of Jammu and Kashmir on 26 March 1928 by the Maharaja of Jammu and Kashmir. When the Jammu and Kashmir Reorganisation Act, 2019 split the former State into the two Union Territories of Jammu and Kashmir and of Ladakh with effect from 31 October 2019, the existing High Court was retained as the common High Court for both. In July 2021 the cumbersome official title 'Common High Court for the Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir and Union Territory of Ladakh' was shortened to 'High Court of Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh' through the Jammu and Kashmir Reorganisation (Removal of Difficulties) Order, 2021, signed by then President Ram Nath Kovind. Until now, however, the court sat only at Srinagar and Jammu, so litigants and advocates from Ladakh had to travel out of the Union Territory for High Court hearings.

Ladakh is a cold-desert Union Territory of high altitude and sparse, widely scattered settlements, and its road links to the Kashmir Valley and to Jammu are closed or unreliable for parts of the year. For a litigant in Leh or Kargil, approaching the High Court has therefore meant expense and delay that have little to do with the merits of the case. Access to justice is treated in Indian constitutional law as an element of the right to life and personal liberty under Article 21, and physical distance from the forum is one of the recognised barriers to it. A third seat inside the Union Territory addresses that barrier directly, and it also matters institutionally: it is the first significant expansion of High Court presence in Ladakh since the Union Territory was created in 2019, and it complements the finding that only half of Ladakh's ten subdivisions had subordinate court infrastructure as of late 2025.