St. Columba's School, in Delhi, does an excellent job of teaching English and Mathematics and Physics. Sanskrit, however, is not emphasized. I believe you are supposed to pass an exam in it in the Eighth standard but the rule wasn't strictly enforced when former CJI Chandrachud and I were studying there. However, even the most deracinated St. Columban knows that the word for law in Sanskrit is not, as Chandrachud now says, 'niti'- which means policy and is something decided by a 'neta' or leader. Rather it is vidhi- a mandatory injunction. An observance is a niyam and 'Nyaya' is the word for Justice. In Hindi, we speak of kanoon which derives from the Greek 'canon' via Arabic and Persian. It is notable that in the Hindi version of the Indian Constitution, 'vidhi' is used for 'law' or 'kanoon'. Chandrachud does not appear to know this.
I should mention 'Nyaya' is linked to 'Artha' because the proper hermeneutic to apply is pragmatic or instrumental. In other words, 'meaning' is 'cash value'. It is economia, not akreibia- i.e. discretionary and defeasible rather than rigid or narrow. In other words, it already contains its own equitable principle such that where the law falls short by reason of too great generality, there is an equitable remedy. But the same is true when there is 'akreibia'- i.e. the fault of seeking greater precision than the subject matter affords. In this Indian 'dharmashastras' are at one with Greek and Latin jurisprudence. Dharma was translated by Indo-Greeks as 'eusebia' (Latin- pietas) and economia rather akreibia is recommended in the pursuit of this great, eusocial, goal.
The law is a defeasible 'samskar' whose aim is to improve economic outcomes. In this sense, everything is 'res integra' till Authority decides policy in consonance with due process of Law. Justiciability is narrow and can only be concerned with that purely formal, not substantive, consonance. Otherwise, Authority has been usurped from what is Sovereign to a merely adjudicative body. Well and good, if it can raise taxes and pay for its own Armies. Otherwise, this is merely imbecility or hubris of a type which invites its own swift Nemesis.
A crooked-policy (kutniti) may worsen economic outcomes so that some particular clique can extract a rent or maintain their higher status. But the thing is repugnant. Don't do it. Improve Society by raising productivity. Don't be a Social Justice Warrior who kills off the golden goose of industry. Learn how to draw up a contract or a will which stands up in court. Get together with a good Accountant and a guy who is good at Marketing or Social Media or whatever and see whether you can add value to existing businesses in your area. Start now. Don't wait till you get your credentials.
In a recent speech given to law graduates, Chandrachud equated 'niti' with law and 'nyay' with Justice. Why? The silly man has been reading Amartya Sen who propounded a 'nyaya-niti' distinction. This corresponded to getting rid of 'doctrine of political question' (i.e. policy matters are not justiciable per se) so as to concentrate all power in the Bench. But that has never worked. The Legislature passes Budgets and raises Taxes and pays for Armies. Judges can't usurp that function.
Chandrachud sometimes quotes Lon Fuller who warned judges against 'the morality of aspiration' as opposed to the 'morality of duty'. The legal system is deontic- i.e. concerned with duties arising out of a vinculum juris. It is not concerned with aspirations to higher types of virtue or duty which are the province of the clergyman or the poet or the idealistic rhetorician. In Chandrachud's judgments we find too much 'aspiration' and too little 'duty'.
Indians who study law in India have few illusions about the Indian judicial system. It is a mark of Chandrachooth's deracination that he tells young Indian lawyers-
At many points in your career, you will realise that what is legal is probably unjust whereas what is just may not be always legal.
The task of the lawyer is to find legal remedies for injustices suffered by his client. The problem is that there may be no injustice. No doubt, from the 'aspirational' point of view everything that is, is unjust. Future generations will think ill of us because we tolerate a repugnant state of affairs. But what is repugnant is a movable feast. The starving have to eat things which the rich turn their noses up at. Yet, to climb out of poverty is an arduous process. It is those who had stronger reason to fear starvation who expended greater efforts to accumulate skills and resources such that their descendants could take opulence for granted.
I believe Chandrachud is an admirer of Lon L. Fuller's theory that a system of law has an 'internal morality'. But, since judges are paid by the tax-payer, surely that morality should involve considering how to raise total factor productivity? This, it seems to me, is what Fuller type 'Eunomics' would involve. Yet, Chandrachud himself invoked Fuller and the notion of a 'polycentric web' in his dissenting judgment in Aadhar. This begs the question, why should the Government meet a higher standard of justification? Structured proportionality is either utilitarian- i.e. 'greatest good of the greatest number'- or it places a higher value on liberty in a manner that the Constitution of India, particularly the first amendment, emphatically rules out. It appears that Chandrachud thinks judges are like novelists who should feel free to write anything they like in the next chapter of a novel even if it is inconsistent with what went before. This is the doctrine of a hippy, not a Harvard trained legal scholar.
This is where your law school training of learning to critique the law will come in handy....
Law schools train you in understanding and applying the law, not in critiquing it. Economists or Political Scientists or Philosophers or polemicists may be better at critique. Chandrachud, it appears, may have had his brains destroyed at Harvard Law School.
You must remember the importance of differentiating between law and justice and critiquing the law as a step to advance justice.
Legislators are authorized not just to critique but to change the law. Lawyers are officers of the court. They are expected to show deference to judges and to uphold the laws as they are written. Critique may be done in specific forums- e.g. journals of jurisprudence- but it is out of place in the ordinary course of a lawyer's business.
Niti, in other words, does not always result in Nyay,"
Niti means policy. The Executive is the 'Neta' which decides and implements policy. This may be subject to judicial review. But what Judges can't do is decide policy. Where this occurs, we say the Executive & Legislature implicitly delegated that function to the Court. But they do not lose that right or that function just because they slept upon it. The moment the Bench is defied by the Executive, its authority collapses. The animals of the jungle may flee before a jackal which strides in front of a lion. But the jackal has no inherent power.
Chandrachud said-
"Stepping into the world as fresh graduates amidst the increasing noise and confusion of political, social and moral clashes of ideologies, you must be guided by the path of your own conscience and equitable reason.
No. Lawyers must be guided by the science of law. Everybody has a conscience. Everybody has a feeling for what they think is required by an equitable rule of reason. But lawyers must tell their clients what the 'per se' rule is. True, they might be able to persuade the Court to apply an equitable remedy. But what are the relevant costs and benefits? That is what lawyers must inform their clients about.
What Chandrachud is doing is encouraging ignorant youngsters to bring all sorts of nonsensical PILs while telling their paying clients fairy tales. There are old and rich advocates or failed politicians who can take this path. But they create a nuisance. Chandrachud was a Peter Pan type of figure who did nothing to curb this nuisance.
Speak truth to power,
Don't reveal confidential information about your client to powerful people. Chandrachud doesn't think before he opens his mouth.
maintain your composure in the face of unspeakable social injustices
No. You are welcome to lose your composure under those circumstances. It is in Court that you need to maintain decorum.
and utilise your good fortune and privileged positions to remedy them,"
The bad luck of your clients is the source of your fortune unless you stick to boring commercial work.
Being accepting and tolerant of the opinions of others
is irrelevant.
by no means translates into blind conformity and it does not mean not standing up against hate speech
It doesn't mean anything at all. Chandrachud hasn't put his brain in gear.
You may encounter people who will tell you the situation is much better than before or better than situation in other places.
You may encounter this shithead talking bollocks.
However, the journey to justice does not stop midpoint or where we feel that we are less unjust than the others
There is no journey to justice. The thing is a service industry just like Banking or Insurance. If it is shit, it will be disintermediated or ignored.
Not content with channelling Sen, Chandrachud mentions the cretin Iris Young.
"As Iris Young discusses, cultural imperialism
e.g. deracinated cunts like Chandrachud interfering in the ancient religious practices of Hindus
is one of the faces of oppression faced by marginalised groups
This stupid cunt does not know that India was ruled by the British. Indians weren't 'marginalized'. They weren't a minority. But they were subject to imperialism- including linguistic and cultural imperialism. Chandrachud may be Brown, but he is the face of cultural imperialism in India. Call him a cunt and tell him to go fuck himself. That's a type of parrhesia we can all get behind.
and she knows how the dominant culture will always define such groups as deviant...
Chandrachud is now pretending to be 'Sanatani'. But he also thinks 'niti' means law. Thankfully, his own 'culture'- viz. that of Harvard Law School back in the Eighties- had stopped being dominant in America. Vance says the Executive can defy the Bench with impunity.
in other words respectability politics may sometimes even lead to further marginalisation of sub-groups," he said.
Being ignored or actively derided will marginalize the tiny sub-group which is the 'Collegium'.
He then proceeded to differentiate between law and justice
The law is only concerned with justiciability. If the Bench says everything is justiciable, very soon nothing will be. Either the Bench replaces the Executive, and raises taxes and fields Armies on its own authority, or it is ignored or disintermediated.
and the importance of social justice lawyering.
The thing is a nuisance. If you raise compliance costs or the regulatory burden in a field, there is less output and employment. Those who beat and kill officers of the Court monopolize the industry.
In this regard, he quoted from William Quigley's 'Letter to a Law Student interested in Social Justice'
India's productivity per hour is $8 per hour. It is $82 per hour in the US. America can afford Social Justice. India can't. What this stupid cunt should be talking about is how lawyers can raise total factor productivity. If they don't contribute to this, they will be disintermediated.
"A lot of work which leads to achieving justice within law also happens outside the law in terms of social movements, faith in politics and cultural understanding.
Actual work is productive work- i.e. stuff which results in more goods and services being produced. India needs to raise general purpose productivity. It doesn't need virtue signalling shitheads like Chandrachooth.
In our own context we don't have to look too far to decipher the difference between law and justice.
Justice, David Hume said, has utility. It raises total factor productivity. It has nothing to do with stupid prejudices or what is or isn't politically correct.
It was only in 2005 that
only Hindu but not Muslim or Christian
women were granted interest in coparcenary property and were given equality in terms of succession to property.
in other words, there will be increased fragmentation of agricultural land and SMEs will break up more often. Also, there will be more cousin marriage, lower female participation, and 'out of caste' marriages will lead to murder. Still, so long as the Lutyens' elite gets to pat itself on the back, who gives an actual fuck?
Until the longest time in our history, there was no legislation regulating child labour.
In my, and Chandrachud's, lifetime, there has been plenty of such legislation. It doesn't work. It is useless. At one time maybe political parties could squeeze a bit of money out of bigger employers of child or bonded labour. But they found it cheaper to kidnap and kill politicians till they themselves got paid off.
Minimum wages across the world are a result of recent labour movements.
They are useless. This silly man doesn't get that productivity has to rise otherwise there are no jobs. This doesn't mean people don't work in the unorganized sector. It just means what they are doing isn't a job. There is no employer per se.
'During your own time at law school, Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code which criminalised sexual relations even between consenting adults of the same gender was the law of the land.
Only 5 people were ever prosecuted under it up to 1920. After that it wasn't used at all. This was pure gesture politics. It changed absolutely nothing.
It was only in Navtej Singh Jauhar v. Union of India, a bench of which I was part of that the Supreme Court held that Section 377 was unconstitutional,"
Sadly, that judgment was itself unconstitutional. As a previous Bench had observed, it was up to the Legislature to provide the remedy. My point is what the Bench gives, the Bench can take away. It if usurps the right to say what is or isn't constitutional, it can itself be reconstituted to make the constitution mean anything at all.
He also added that pursuing a career in social justice lawyering may not be for everyone as graduates from impoverished backgrounds might have education loans to pay off and might, therefore, have to take up high-paying jobs.
They won't get them. 90 per cent of lawyers make their money from 'bureaucratic facilitation'- i.e. filling out forms and standing in a queue at Government offices. The total legal market in India is only about 1.3 billion dollars. That's about 0.5 percent (ppp) of the global market. There are probably about 1.7 million lawyers in India. There are over twelve hundred law schools churning out 100,000 lawyers every year. Chandrachud should stop gassing on about 'Social Justice' and tell these kids to concentrate on getting their clients to do business with each other so as to make a money drafting contracts and arranging loans etc.
"But one can promote Constitutional values and social justice if you imbibe Constitutional morality in the way you conduct your professional life regardless of the career you pursue,"
Very true. Beggars can promote constitutional values by begging outside the courts where they hoped to practice.
Chandrachud hoped law students would 'refrain from perpetuating the traditional formalistic approaches to law.'The Supreme Court judge also stressed on the importance of reinterpreting law.
in other words, increase uncertainty so that investment falls and, at the margin, firms exit the jurisdiction.
"Along with critiquing law, it is important to simultaneously look for ways in which laws can be reimagined and redefined to make them better and more just.
These cunts are too stupid to do any such thing.
The reinterpretation of law takes place as much through the lawyer's vision as through the judges craft," he stated.
But Indian lawyers and Indian judges are shit. There's a good reason why the Indian legal market is so small. It is merely a tool of harassment & delay.
Consider Singapore. Its legal market is twice the size of India and it exports 0.9 billion of legal services. I don't know what proportion of that is Indian in origin but I believe that if Indian courts weren't so utterly shit and there were better tax-breaks for start-ups there would be 2 billion of Indian origin (i.e. contracting parties are Indian) business coming to Indian lawyers in India. This would have a multiplier effect for other service industries.
Importantly, he said that lawyers should not be afraid of failures.
They should be afraid of being as poor as fuck because their industry is focused on 'social justice' rather than raising total factor productivity. Look at the Indian software industry. It earns the country money, some of which can be given to the poor.
"Always remember to not be afraid of failure. As a matter of fact, if you are not trying to achieve things when you are falling, you are probably not even trying to meet you potential because it is only at that edge that you will receive equal amounts of success and lawyer.
I suppose he means job-satisfaction as a lawyer. The problem is that these cunts have been getting a lot of satisfaction out of fucking up the country, destroying their own profession, and creating the conditions for a backlash of the sort Trump's America is witnessing.
And if you are in the space of social lawyering, always remember that
you are a virtue signalling cunt. Anyway, a criminalized Trade Union leader (who may have a law degree) can do a better job extorting money from local employers, till they go bankrupt or run away. But that's what Social Justice means.
never has justice been achieved in any movement without encountering failure, criticism or chaos,"
The Indian legal system is chaotic. Chandrachooth was the Master-bator of the Roster of Disaster.
He also cautioned against being swayed by social media distractions.
Chandrachooth has an 'only fans' page- right? Don't get distracted by it.
"It also helps to remember especially the world of social media with a limited attention spans, that a lot of work you do will have only long term impact
of a wholly mischievous type
and you should not worry too much about the everyday distractions that will become a given in your path," he opined.
The everyday distraction will be to earn enough to put food on the table.
Before winding up he added that "as young wide eyed graduates, you must aspire to attain utopia, for the harbingers of change are often hopeless dreamers."
The Indian judiciary needs to change. Court administration must be separated and streamlined. Justice is a knowledge based service industry just like the software or BPO industry. To restore the prestige of the legal profession, productivity has to rise. The word Utopia means 'nowhere'. Hopeless dreamers and senile shitheads are welcome to fuck off to Utopia. But young Indian law graduates need to understand Coase Posner style Law & Econ. They can add value and contribute to Total factor productivity by telling Social Justice to go fuck itself. Grow the Economy if you want a better Society.
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