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...