Justice Kannan's Legal speak

The new mantra is fitness. It is the buzz word amongst the business elite, the filmy people, the celebrities and indeed everyone who is a person of reckoning. As lawyers and judges, we are more the objects of public gaze, as performers of cerebral arts through speaking and writing. We work at home, at the chambers, in the car and in the courts. There is a whole range of people of diverse ages, the young, middle aged and the old; the galloping types, the slithering ones and the slow paced; the persons who traverse the corridors in ones, twos and in a multitude. Whoever you are and whichever category that you belong, ask yourself these questions: Do you scowl at the folks at home when you return after a hard day’s work? Do you refuse to be drawn into any fun game with your young son or daughter? Do you scorch your clients with harsh words, for his query-some concerns about when his case is likely to be disposed of? If your answer is yes to any of the questions, it is time to shift gear. ...

Law and logic seem to be inextricably inter-twined that a serious practitioner of law is tempted to believe that a structured reasoning alone could deliver results. In actuality, a certain kink in a smooth terrain brings unbelievably superb results. This applies to what makes poetry; what explains great economic theories; what makes a comic situation; what secures enduring results in a negotiated settlement and what gets at truth in cross examination of witnesses. Each of these statements would admit of facile examples. Modern poetry makes no virtue of meter and rhythm. The content has to be fresh, though. It should fill you with wonderment by the time the central idea to the poetry sinks. Haiku adopts one such technique. A Japanese innovation that once was, is universal in its practice. Even Rabindra Nath Tagore wrote Haiku poems in Bengali. The beauty of this form is its brevity and a stunningly surprise element in the last line. The first two lines go along a trajectory and the thir...

Shri.V.C. Gopalranam, who edited the commemoration volume of the completion of a century of the High Court had catchy slogans for judges and lawyers alike, for the work turned out by them through his expressions, ‘They sat and decided’ while referring to the Judges and said of the lawyers, ‘They stood and argued’. Even apart from the judges and lawyers, are we justified in trying to gauge the development of law only by the judgments rendered by High Courts and Supreme Court without minding the vast repertoire of statutory enactments and the writings of eminent authors, asked Shri.T.R.Mani, a venerable senior counsel of Madras High Court, when we were trying to trace the development of law by the Madras High Court with reference to landmark judgments of our High Court. Significant developments there no doubt have been, when through judgments, there were new interpretations of statutory law; when the principles of law have been enunciated through lucid judgments and when judgments have s...

Would you care to know about what you are worth as a lawyer? Our lawyers offer their services ranging from over 1 million rupees as day fee to a few eggs for personal consumption for bail. The lucky part is that the rates are settled in the confines of a lawyer’s chamber or in the shady region of a tree. It neither attracts media attention nor celebrity participation of attractive men and women attired in see through dresses and flamboyant goggles. If the Indian Premier League’s strategy of promoting the cause of cricket through cash-rich industrial houses should catch universal attention to adaptation in other fields as well, we may see many of our professionals going up in auctions. The players themselves have sounded buoyant. Some have said that this signals the beginning of new era of popularizing the game. Some have said that the players have never had it better for improving their game for being offered better bids in future. The players have known their relative worth , they say...

Strange is the course of legal history. The most remembered are not the men who wrote long judgments. Brevity has never been a popular trait either with judges or lawyers. You will find as many judges complaining about lawyers’ long winding arguments as you may hear of lawyers grimacing about the prolix ways of some of the judges. Chief Justice Sikri wrote 2263 paragraphs in about 650 pages in print in Kesavananda Bharati’s case. Perhaps, it was the longest judgment by a single judge in our Constitutional history of India since 1950. But whose name resonates with passion in your memory when you think of this case? In the same vein, when someone speaks to you about the ‘darkest hour of Indian judiciary’, who do you think held up the torch in that blinding abyss to which individual liberty was buried in ADM Jabalpur? It is impossible to forget the name of H.R.Khanna. Along with him were 4 men, who held differently and each had well trained writing prowess to give good reasons to support ...

The budget proposal to write off debts to the tune of Rs.60,000 crores due by small and medium farmers to the banking sector and rural co-operative credit has been greeted with hooplas and hurrahs. A renowned scientist of international reckoning has said that these measures are not sufficient. He has pleaded for expanding the categories of farmers eligible for waivers to include persons holding larger extents with no irrigation facilities, persons with land holdings in certain dry parts of the country and also to farmers who have availed of credit from private money lenders. The last suggestion is a topic too familiar to lawyers. It was in the then Madras Presidency that the saga of agriculturists debt relief legislations began. Called by the common folk as Rajaji Act, it was Act 4 of 1938 that contained provisions for reducing the rate of interest of loans for agriculturists, notwithstanding the specifications for higher interest in the contract, provisions for scaling down of debts h...