Justice Kannan's Legal speak

What do you make of red coloured walls in court premises? Some of the walls inside our High Court premises have been painted red recently. Bureaucratic lethargy is also conjured in the mind as preserved through red walls. If you are walking past the musty files strewn about in the corridors, waiting to be re- arranged in the steel shelves, you will realise, the mix of colour and smell give you rather a glum feeling. Courts are rather un-amusing places. Your own perception of what is just and what result that you can obtain for your client put you through an unenviable ordeal, when you enter the court halls. A judge knitting his eye brows to get at the truth through the facts and law enmeshed in a cumbersome snare of arguments is weighed down to hold a tough countenance. However, cell phones have contributed their own bit to enliven the lives of all persons, notably lawyers in courts. Lawyers with cell phones, who are walking in the corridors or standing under the trees or sitting in th...

Mr. Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry was reinstated as Pakistan Supreme Court Chief Justice by the judgment of the 13 member Bench of the Supreme Court on 20th July 2007. In a second part of the verdict, the Supreme Court, 10-3, threw out the reference against the Chief Justice filed by President Pervez Musharraf, calling it illegal. Earlier, Chief Justice Choudhry was engaged in doing precisely what the administration least wanted. He aired its dirty laundry and issued judgments seeking rectification. In 2006, he blocked a government bid to sell the majority of the state-owned Pakistan Steel Mills to a private consortium, a blow that proved a rare and embarrassing check on the administration. Following public outcry in January 2007, the judge also compelled the government to trace the whereabouts of terrorism suspects, many of whom had been allegedly jailed without evidence and prevented from contacting their families. When results were not produced fast enough, he chastised a government ...

"Words, words, words", says Hamlet, in response to Polonius' question, "What do you read, my lord?" Of course, Polonius wants to know the meaning of the words in the book that Hamlet is reading, but Hamlet's answer suggests that they are meaningless. Polonius then follows up with a clarification, "What is the matter, my lord?" By "matter," Polonius means "subject matter," but Hamlet again deliberately misinterprets. He takes "matter" to mean something wrong (as we do when we say "What's the matter with you?") and answers Polonius' question with a question ("Between who?"), as though someone were quarrelling with someone else. Shakespeare exposes but a facet of comic situation when every word that we say gets misinterpreted the wrong way and the whole conversation gets to circumlocution. This is not just among ordinary persons’ oral exchanges. What do you think happens in statutory texts, whe...

Pain and suffering are a twosome expression that is believed to follow one another, like dark clouds and rain or, that goes well with each other, like, bread and butter. They constitute an important head of claim in tortious action and for quantification of damages. Pain is a qualitative response to an unpleasant stimulus that could be either physical or mental. Physical injury as resulting in pain is more common than psychiatric injury resulting either to a primary victim to the words expressed or to a secondary victim to the scene beholden of a physical wrong done to another. Both the Indian Penal Code and the laws that allow for compensation for civil wrongs recognize physical and mental injuries as coming within the definition of injuries. If a person inflicts pain voluntarily or accidentally to you in a legal relationship that requires an obligation not to cause harm, the act becomes either an offence or a civil wrong. If it is self inflicted, such a consequence may not follow. Wh...

RASHTRAPATH(N)I Why look for differences, instead of similarities between sexes? Are you complaining, ‘if men and women are equal, why clamor for privileges or look for special treatment?’ Melvin Konner, a renowned anthropologist poses the question, ‘Why raise gender differences?’ and answers in his book, The Tangled Wing that ‘insistence upon the nonexistence of significant biological basis for the different behaviors (that) we observe in the two genders, can only obscure the path to understanding, amelioration, and justice. The truth may not be helpful, but the concealment of it cannot be (helpful either).’ Ignoring differences may lead to temporary harmony but it does not make them go away. Differences that you wish to tuck away from view remain as differences. As one thinker would say, ignoring the aggressive nature of males or the female inclination toward mothering does not eliminate the differences; it only drives them underground, with predictable eruptions later, often involvi...

Big brother, the love personified! George Orwell’s all-seeing leader of the dystopian Oceania, Big Brother, symbolizes the eyes and voice of the state machinery that has ubiquitous presence: around the street corner, up the billboard, in your bed room and literally purveys all your activities. This character gave birth to a kind of real life soap, invented by the Dutchman John de Mol and developed by his production company, Endemol . It is reported to be a prime time hit as a TV program in over 70 countries. The weekly tasks for the participants are set by an invisible big brother. G 8 is some kind of a big brother in the global political arena. Here it is not just one person, but an assemblage of self styled mighty eight that condescends to set the agenda for governance for the rest of the world. Together, these countries represent only 14% of the world population, but they account for nearly two thirds of the world's economic output measured by gross domestic product . China and ...

Are you frequently talking about the ‘good old days’? It is probably a symptom that you are getting old! How do you bring back the youth in you? To many of us, the constant refrain is that the present is choking us and the worthwhile distraction is a fanciful flight down the memory lane about the things of the past. As Thomas Carlyle would say, ‘The past is all holy to us; the dead are all holy; even they that were wicked when alive!’ That is why it is said that the past is the only dead thing that smells sweet. Decrying the present is an eternal malady. The great old days that your father talked about were actually days of slavery under the foreign rule and how Bharati fulminated with emotion about ‘the heart that is seared when you think about those cowards’, in his words, ‘Nenju porukkudillaye…’ We reminisce in the past with pleasure, whenever the talk hinges about the lawyers’ practice in courts; of the doyens of the bar that strode the courts’ corridors; about the great judges tha...

What is your personal rating of your father-in-law? Every relationship through (lawful) marriage up to the second degree gets a suffix ‘in-law’. Among other relatives for a man, the father-in-law occupies a unique position. He is for ever visualized as a person to whom all and sundry demands could be placed! He treats you as ‘mapillai’, by which expression you enjoy several privileges; It is even a bye-word for being fashionable (‘dress like mapillai’); enables you to play tantrums ( ‘mapllai murukku’) and even complain freely about his daughter, what you can’t do directly to your wife! In the pre-independence days, when English judges presided over High courts and subtle principles of Hindu law were expounded through judicial pronouncements by reference to original Sanskrit texts, lawyers had to strain every sinew to help judges lay down the correct law. A story attributed to Rajah Iyer, a doyen among lawyers, was: He was explaining the position of various legal heirs and their respe...

M.F.Hussain, Shilpa Shetty and Chandra Mohan have suddenly newfound friends and enemies. The issues underlying the highly charged emotional fulminations against them and in a greater degree, to the righteous indignation among the intellectual elite against the self-styled moralists have been the dimensions of license to the forms of expressions that arts and artists shall enjoy through their chosen medium. In all the cases, police have acted on complaints of certain sections of the public, who have claimed that their religious sensibilities have been hurt or the cultural mores of our country have been undermined; and in two of the cases, the magistrates have been persuaded to issue summons to the artists to answer to the criminal charges. M.F.Hussain would draw the picture of a nude woman and call her Goddess Saraswati. Nude pictures per se would not have made a difference, but when he decides to call the painting as of Goddess Saraswati, he draws flak. If two celebrities kiss each oth...

K.Kannan, Editor, Madras Law Journal with R.Yashod Vardhan, Advocates, Madras High Court ‘ The law must be stable, but must not stand still’, said an eminent US Jurist, Roscoe Pound. The march of law is forever a forward progression. Law obtains refinement only through lawyers’ oration and judges’ pen. The year 2006 has seen significant strides in the realm of law. We take pleasure in presenting this subject after a let-up for quite a few years. However, there is no pretension to digest all the case laws; we have limited our observations to footprints left behind by Supreme Court of India and the Madras High Court alone seen through the prism of the issues of the Madras Law Journal. Of the Madras High Court judgments, there is a deliberate restrictive ring that we have drawn for ourselves by treading mostly on Bench decisions of the High Court. The salutary rule of stare decisis is: ‘ What has once been settled by a precedent will not be ...