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Human Rights Law Schools Litigation

Those who can, teach – How law teaching builds bridges and fosters intellectual arenas

AtreyeeMajumder_CraftingLawCareersLaw is a difficult thing to teach. It requires the teaching of large concepts that vastly influence how governments and authority work or should work. Skills needed for the application, implementation, and adjudication of legal provisions are important and need to be taught as well.

The law classroom, I had felt, was less effective in teaching law than the practical experience of having to work out a legal argument to fit a real-life situation. This slipping on of the real-life shoes however, is not possible without a basic skill-set, one that is complex and diverse. Different law-teaching systems have had different visions about this skill-set.

The four legal professionals who have featured in this series so far have all had some teaching experience. Usha Ramanathan has, during the course of her career, taught at the National Law School of India University (“NLSIU”), Bangalore, the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, and at the National Law University, Delhi. Arvind Narrain has taught, among others, courses related to human rights and illegal citizenship at NLSIU and several ad hoc courses on human rights, gender, and sexuality for non-law students. Harish Narasappa has taught short courses at the Indian Institute of Management and at NLSIU. Amba Salelkar takes classes on disability law at Vidya Sagar, a Chennai-based non-profit organisation.

Building bridges to law

The challenges of teaching  feature amidst the larger practice of being publicly engaged lawyers. Students from non-law backgrounds, both Salelkar and Narrain say, are not daunted by the law. People in non-profit organisations in particular, where the knowledge of law can significantly reorient practice, seem to come at it with enthusiasm. Narrain has experienced great fortitude among college students coming at judgments on sexual violence containing disturbing details. He says he found in the classroom, key allies for the campaign against Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code. People who were intrigued or interested came forth and became involved.

Many law teachers find themselves delivering bridges to the world of law to students of politics, economics, management, and development studies. Sudhir Krishnaswamy, who has taught at several law schools and has designed and taught a law and governance concentration in the development masters programme at Azim Premji University, is immersed in this exercise. He says that his primary learning from the programme was that students of non-elite backgrounds were grappling with their first encounters with the law in ways very similar to first year law students. The challenges they faced, too, were similar to the ones faced by law students – in learning to work with law and fact. The diversity of material he used has expanded considerably. For instance, he engages more thickly with legal history, using literature from colonial and post-colonial history in general. These are materials he read himself, but didn’t use in law school classrooms. Krishnaswamy’s long teaching career has shaped his belief that law as a discipline, actively straddles the domain of social sciences and humanities, especially as it concerns questions of language and cognition.

Teaching law without the intention to teach

Law teaching can be seen, thus, along three major lines – teaching in a law programme, teaching in a non-law programme, and teaching law outside the university set-up. It helps me to elaborate on the third aspect first. Law arrives at the ears of lawyers through courts, judgments, other lawyers – seniors and peers, and in the classroom. A good part of the teaching can and may occur without the intention to teach. The professional architecture places some people in pedagogic positions with regard to others. Many in the litigating field would say the senior advocates they worked for, were their teachers or gurus. They did not teach the disciplines of law in the packaged form that is usually delivered in a classroom. Skills and intuitions about what the law can offer in a given situation, and how best to use this avenue to one’s advantage, might however, be best learnt and taught through everyday interactions. Many say they learnt a lot of law listening to court proceedings, especially as interns.

I am surprised at this as court proceedings occur in fragments where the issue at stake may not be clear to a bystander who does not have access to the relevant case file. Matters quickly transition into the next matter of the day, one realm of law to the next. If a bystander – a litigant, a journalist, or an intern – learns from this, it is not intended teaching that she derives from. It is a kind of learning by immersion – osmosis, perhaps. Languages are learnt often by immersion in the social milieu where the language is spoken. Can law be learnt and taught in the same way? Some say it is an effective way.

The other method of ‘unintentioned’ teaching and learning of the law, more predictably, is through books. Law reporters, treatises, newspaper articles, and the Internet are ways in which a legal topic or idea can be learnt and disseminated. There is a vast difference of course between reading a thick tome on jurisprudence in a dark library and opening several news websites at one go and consuming some update on a legal matter as one of the many things the Internet offers for consumption. The written word is common to both modes of communication and receipt and the latter is often an effective way for a non-legal audience to learn about the law. Undergraduate students’ interests are often piqued by legal domains being involved in a matter of contemporary news – for instance, land acquisition in recent months, because of the amendment bill. I continue to learn about the law (being no longer in practice) talking with friends and colleagues who are experts in legal fields, and from the media, especially from commentaries and editorials written by practicing lawyers like Indira Jaising and Flavia Agnes.

The classroom as an intellectual arena

Sudhir Krishnaswamy (left), Amba Salelkar, and Arvind Narrain.

Sudhir Krishnaswamy (left), Amba Salelkar, and Arvind Narrain.

The classroom though, remains an important space. What is its specific role from the point of view of legal professionals who have multifaceted careers? A classroom offers the possibility of a dialogic space. Facts and ideas may be taught and disseminated there. But if the teacher is attentive, it can unfold into a  democratic and dynamic intellectual arena. Like Narrain’s experience where students became long-term associates, for many teachers whose interest in the law is motivated by possibilities of change, the classroom should be an important space to invest in. Salelkar has found the need to press a certain literacy of law, especially constitutional law, to be important in her classes on disability law. She finds it a challenge to veer between giving activists too much hope and too little. Many, she finds, enter the domain of law with great wonder and energy. Krishnaswamy found it a place to toy with law’s relationship with the broad spectrum of social sciences. I have found the acquaintance of teachers who create longer paths of learning to often begin in the classroom discussion. The discussion itself may be of lesser importance but the dialogic space it affirms creates intellectual alliances that might have long-term implications for both parties. The importance of law teaching grows with the possibility of law creating a democratic space in addition to the ones already available in civil society.

(Atreyee Majumder is an anthropologist. She teaches at the School of Development, Azim Premji University.)

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How Narrain, Narasappa, and Salelkar built organisations that helped non-legal actors engage with the law

AtreyeeMajumder_CraftingLawCareersA lawyer is conventionally imagined as a standalone creature – someone who exercises the faculties of research, drafting, and argumentation as an individual. A lawyer operates in these modes, usually aided by clerks and junior associates. With the expansion of the modes of negotiation-based lawyering, legal work has spread across large teams and progresses along associational logics. This is especially true for legal practice in transactional advice, due-diligence exercises, arbitration, and so on. Of the four figures I have spoken about before, three have started or helped start new organisations – Arvind Narrain started the Alternative Law Forum, Amba Salelkar helped with the establishment of the Inclusive Planet Centre for Disability Law and Policy, and Harish Narasappa has been involved with starting two organisations – Samvad Partners and Daksh India. I wish to focus on the specific skill of beginning, sustaining, and spreading an organisation. It is not a skill that lawyering necessarily teaches. Why did these lawyers see value in initiating organisations?

We might derive organisational models from the eminent French sociologist Emile Durkheim – shared values and goals lead to a mechanical solidarity, while organic solidarity arises out of a community fitting into each other’s needs. It is difficult to fit a legal organisation clearly into the fold of one or the other. In focusing on three policy reform and legal activism organisations, I might show that their inception is closely linked with a different strategy of lawyering, and therefore, form the bases of mechanical solidarity.

Harish Narasappa at the launch of Daksh's Rule of Law Project on February 7, 2015.

Harish Narasappa at the launch of Daksh’s Rule of Law Project on February 7, 2015.

The Alternative Law Forum (“ALF”) quite literally spells its agenda out as ‘alternative’; the others too attempt to put in place a professional architecture where a diverse set of lawyering services may be nurtured and delivered. Inclusive Planet attempts to provide a bridge between mainstream lawyering wisdom and large numbers of persons with disability, advocates, caregivers, and others, who need a basic understanding of what the law is and what it can deliver for them to address disability. The spread of such legal literacy is at the heart of the ALF’s long career as well – Narrain and his colleagues speak to many non-legal audiences, especially students, about legal issues of contemporary importance, especially on gender and sexuality. At Daksh, the engagement with the public is to train a certain ear for information which is to be culled out, collated, published, and fed back into the citizenry in order to be used for effective democratic practice, in elections and elsewhere. These methods generate solidarities beyond the technological walls of legal learning and expertise. Publics involved in the journey towards a certain mode of justice or equity, come to use and inhabit the law and its machinery through such organisations. Publics are able to imagine themselves as active users of legal and judicial wings of the state. As much as this habitation may bring concrete benefits in terms of legal reform or relief, it also generates a live register in which to rehearse and consolidate the terms of citizenship.

Organisations like the Lawyers’ Collective and individual lawyers like Rajeev Dhavan, Indira Jaisingh, Prashant Bhushan, and others have provided such organisational leadership in the litigating domain. These lawyers have formed bridges between social movements, civil society orgnisations, and the judiciary, often urging the judiciary to take activist stances towards various state and private bodies. Their lawyering has yielded expansive interpretations of fundamental rights especially in the context of free speech, discrimination, the rights of minorities, affirmative action, and so on. There is no doubt that the tradition of judicial activism has been a key tool for the broadening of access to law by the general public.

ALF's Lawrence Liang (left) speaking at the iCommons summit in Dubrovnik in 2007.  CC BY 2.0

ALF’s Lawrence Liang (left) speaking at the iCommons summit in Dubrovnik in 2007. CC BY 2.0

Between the law and the public, a dynamic and inchoate space has been sustained by efforts of public interest legal organisations. One could argue that this space is one among many other civil society spaces. I would argue that the use of the law and the conscious engagement of a public in such legal activism, is a specific register of civil society – one that exercises a facility in speaking the impervious state language. It may earn legal benefits. But the long view of benefits is more towards empowering a shade of public voice that speaks the language that the state speaks in. With Daksh especially, we find the ability and scale of operation to be one that impacts the everyday practice of democracy (at the localised scale of the MP and the MLA) for large numbers of citizens. To the extent that it is possible to make democracy meaningful for each citizen, organisational spaces that percolate the effect of law are most important. To this extent, the activities of legal sensitisation, teaching law to non-lawyers, campaigns for non-judicial law reform, implementation efforts that engage state actors, affected parties, intellectuals, and activists are of key importance in the wide arena of civil society efforts to engage the government. To be aware of the law, talk in its idioms, and talk back to law-making and implementing authorities is close to impossible without the assistance of organisations such as this. That lawyers such as Narrain, Salelkar, and Narasappa are able to open spaces for such active engagement with the law, involving non-legal actors, is a significant contribution to the role of law in the functioning of a democracy.

(Atreyee Majumder is an anthropologist. She teaches at the School of Development, Azim Premji University.)

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Be true to the cause, use litigation to support movements and advance the law

Manish_goodhumanrightslawyeringIt’s that every now and again – not often, but occasionally – you get to be a part of justice being done. That really is quite a thrill when that happens.

– Tom Hanks (as Andrew Beckett in Philadelphia)

Across generations, human rights lawyering is fundamentally driven by the passion of seeing justice done. For veteran advocates like the Punjab-based Rajvinder Singh Bains, passion may arise out of witnessing injustice and atrocities. Younger advocates, on the other hand, may be inspired by the work of path-breaking people before them, while also bringing newer perspectives and ideas to the practice. In either case, the passion for the cause is an essential element of being a human rights lawyer.

Beyond passion

MihirDesai_humanrightslawyer

Mihir Desai has three decades of experience with human rights lawyering.

However, while being passionate is important, being effective in court is even more important. “To be a good human rights lawyer, you have to be a good lawyer first,” says Mihir Desai, a veteran advocate and activist from Bombay. Mr. Desai, who has been practising for three decades now, is also the co-founder of the Indian People’s Tribunal on Environment and Human Rights (“IPT”), which describes itself as an “alternative People’s Court that gives voice to the struggles of grass-roots organizations and affected communities” and conducts investigations on human rights and environmental issues. He has worked extensively on human rights issues at the trial court level, and has been instrumental in bringing them into mainstream jurisprudence, through his litigation before courts, movements such as the IPT, and publications like Combat Law. Given the marginalisation of human rights issues at the trial court level, it is all the more important for a lawyer working in this field to have an excellent grasp of procedural as well as substantive law, which is why Mr. Desai encourages all young lawyers in the field to hone their skills in the courtroom.

Among these young lawyers is Rajat Kumar, 28, a graduate from the Gujarat National Law University, who has been practising at the courts in Delhi for just under five years. Headed down the standard National Law University path – with corporate internship after corporate internship, an internship with the Alternative Law Forum, Bangalore introduced him to the world of human rights lawyering and he was immediately attracted to it. A subsequent internship provided him an opportunity to work on the Narmada Bachao Andolan case, as part of which he made a visit to the site of the Sardar Sarovar Dam and interacted with displaced people. The realisation, like the one had by the protagonist in Philadelphia, that one was part of an actual process that was bringing justice to people, was a powerful experience that Mr. Kumar describes as life-changing, and he has never looked back since. After graduating, he joined the offices of Jawahar Raja in Delhi, and now works primarily on criminal and labour law matters.

Mr. Kumar argues most of his labour cases (where he represents workers’ unions) before the Board for Industrial and Financial Reconstruction under the Sick Industrial Companies (Special Provisions) Act, 1985. Contract labour and regularisation of employment is also a major issue, and Mr. Kumar has argued the cases of workers who have been denied benefits due to them, and are trapped in sham contracts. He perceives that the scene for labour rights is not as positive as it used to be. With the increased focus on economic development, he said that there is a corresponding perception that courts are increasingly hostile and reluctant to grant relief to labour, citing the instance of the 2013 Punjab and Haryana High Court order denying bail to the Maruti workers who were arrested during the unrest at Manesar, which mentioned as a ground, the risk to foreign investment due to “fear of labour unrest”. However, as a human rights advocate, it is important to keep the faith and continue the fight for the cause.

Staying the course, true to the cause

Mr. Desai says that a good human rights lawyer works for a cause throughout. There cannot be any inconsistency in the stand that one takes on an issue. The human rights lawyer is committed to the issue and the advocate needs to let go of individual ego and think of the cause. Staying true to a cause also inspires greater levels of trust and confidence among one’s clients. This is why it is important, as a lawyer in this field, to choose one’s cases and remain committed to the cause – for instance, in a labour court, one cannot defend workers one day and managements the next. He clarifies that the right to legal representation is important, but so is the right of an advocate to choose her cases and causes: “An accused rapist is definitely has a right to receive legal representation; but I would not want to be his legal representative. And that’s a consistent stand I take.”

"Important to choose one's cases and remain committed to the cause" - the 28-year-old

“Important to choose one’s cases and remain committed to the cause” – the 28-year-old Rajat Kumar.

The ability to inspire trust and confidence from one’s clients is critical to good human rights lawyering. To illustrate this, Mr. Desai draws on his experiences while arguing some of the Gujarat riot cases as a lawyer for the victims, where despite his perception that the judges were not supportive, he, rather than give up, continued to advance his arguments.

In such situations, where people have been at the receiving end of severe human rights violations and have lost everything except their faith in the law, it is particularly important that they are able to trust their lawyer. A good human rights lawyer should be willing to be there throughout for her clients, no matter what difficulties one might face along the way. Ultimately, says Mr. Desai, what the victims want is complete support and dedication from their lawyer and – irrespective of the final outcome – the feeling that they have been heard, and had their day in court.

Social transformation through human rights litigation

Mr. Desai said that a human rights advocate should be able to use the court process to help and support movements. Therefore, strategy and court craft are critical to the practice of human rights lawyering, even more so at the trial court. Mr. Kumar says that it is important for a lawyer arguing at the trial court to be able to anticipate arguments at the High Court or even the Supreme Court, should her case be dismissed or appealed against. This is particularly significant since the higher courts do not normally deal with matters of evidence. They usually rely on the evidence brought on record before the trial court. Further, while it is difficult to make a direct prayer for relief at the trial court based on a constitutional argument, it is nevertheless important to frame these arguments since even if they are rejected by the trial court, the High Court has the power to recognise them and grant appropriate legal relief. In this context an important part of human rights lawyering is to use arguments that may have not traditionally been accepted by courts. Thus, an advocate has to try at all times to expand the horizon of the courts’ human rights jurisdiction by advancing arguments in that direction, rather than restricting oneself to a narrow legal perspective.

Public interest litigation, or the use of the Cr.P.C. to obtain basic amenities from local authorities, are all examples of this approach. As K.G. Kannabiran argued, lawyering for social justice necessitates a certain stretching of principles and breaking new ground in order to advance the progress of the law as an instrument of social transformation.

Sustainable human rights lawyering

Both Mr. Desai and Mr. Kumar dismiss the misconception that practising human rights lawyering is financially unsustainable. Says Mr. Desai, “If your ambition is to have a Mercedes and stay in five-star hotels, it won’t be remunerative. But it is definitely sustainable in that it will help you lead a reasonably comfortable standard of living.” Both of them cross-subsidise their human rights practice with revenue from regular commercial cases. While accepting commercial cases, they remain conscious of the conflict of interest and only accept cases from clients who do not put them in a situation where they have to compromise on their human rights work or the causes that they espouse. In addition, they also point out that not all human rights work is pro bono – there are several clients who are able to pay, although in these cases one would have to charge according to the client’s capacity and not the regular fees that one would charge in commercial matters.

Personal and professional growth as an advocate is greatly helped by having a mentor in the profession. In this regard, Mr. Desai recalls his early days when he started practising in the chambers of Indira Jaising, who was then (as also now) a leading light in the field of human rights, and an inspirational figure and role model in the profession. Mr. Kumar is grateful to Jawahar Raja, from whom he says he has learned more about the law than he ever did in his five years of law school. It is not an easy practice – as Mr. Desai puts it, while in mainstream lawyering one might win 70 per cent of the time, as a human rights lawyer one might only win 30 per cent of the time. Nevertheless, both Mr. Desai and Mr. Kumar suggest that human rights lawyering is a passion, rather than a sacrifice – both of them whole-heartedly state that they enjoy their work and there is nothing else they would rather be doing.

(Manish is a 2013 graduate of NLSIU, Bangalore and works on issues of access to justice. He is currently based in Ahmedabad.)

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Out of the courts and into the social process – the careers of Harish Narasappa and Amba Salelkar

AtreyeeMajumder_CraftingLawCareers

As a fresh law graduate, Harish Narassappa went to court to be handed a file numbered 1 of 1956. He thought to himself that it must have been a mistake – it must be 1 of 1996, but no, the number was right. Such was the extent of delays in the judicial process, he learnt. In this post, we meet two lawyers who picked up their first legal instincts inside courts – Harish Narasappa and Amba Salelkar – both having taken law degrees at NLSIU, the former in the mid-nineties, the latter in the mid-2000s. They remind us of Ramanathan’s sustained engagement with the question of law and poverty in diverse theatres, but these two lawyers built institutional edifices in furtherance of their queries about law’s role in the social process.

Having completed two stints of corporate practice, in London and in Mumbai, Narasappa returned to his hometown of Bangalore in 2005 and rented a space where he would begin an office. At this point, his vision was to do policy-related work. Two of his friends, Siddharth Raja and Roopa Doraswamy, also alumni of the National Law School of India University, had also quit their jobs, and asked if they could use the space. Over time, this space emerged as a corporate law firm. Their emphasis was on cultivating a space where young lawyers would be recruited and nurtured, where there was gender equity, humane working hours, and so on. The firm, eventually named Samvad Partners, grew over time to have a presence in four Indian cities, but Narasappa’s earlier desire to engage in policy matters had remained unfulfilled.

He started Daksh India in 2006. An idea initially, it took a couple of years to be registered. As a defining question of Daksh, Narasappa and his colleagues were interested in testing the efficacy of ‘democratic institutions’.

“…lot of people do things which makes change visible – volunteer time for a school, give some computers. I wanted to intervene at an institutional level…”

In sheer numbers, India carries an arrogant epithet of the largest democracy, but it is a democracy where the citizen’s capacity is numbed in the five-year period between elections. Further, he may have some form of accountability from elected representatives, but he doesn’t have the same from bureaucrats or other government agencies who may affect his well-being. Often, there is no recourse or clarificatory procedure available unless there has been a violation of a legal right, for which he can go to the courts. He does not know what the stance of his MP or MLA is on important issues like the Lokpal Bill, how he is going to argue in the house, and what his representative’s performance in the house has been like.

Harish Narasappa

Daksh and Narassapa designed a survey, which initially ran in Karnataka, but in the past two years, in other states such as Rajasthan and Bihar as well. The survey results were reflected in ‘scorecards’ for MLAs. Before the 2013 Karnataka assembly elections, leading Kannada newspapers carried their surveys. The representatives who had performed well on the scorecards were happy, those who hadn’t, claimed that the right criteria had not been taken into account. There was great support from people who said that they appreciated knowing these things as they went in to vote. Daksh’s intervention was to make the electoral process more effective by making crucial information available in the public domain, in local languages, for citizens to be able to exercise the franchise effectively. Daksh’s new intervention – the Rule of Law project – addresses the issue of judicial delay. With it, Narasappa attempts to strengthen the bridge between the two legs of his practice – in law and in public policy.

Amba Salelkar moved from a litigating career in a Mumbai criminal law firm to working in disability law and policy, when she quit her Mumbai criminal law career and moved to Chennai to join the Inclusive Planet Centre for Disability Law and Policy. Her work in this realm concerned large sections of the public who suffered physical disability themselves or were caregivers or associates of others who suffered disability, legislators, law implementers, non-legal NGOs, and disability professionals.

After the switch, she could no longer take for granted the literacy in legalese on the part of the large and diverse constituency who were now her colleagues and associates. The other thing she began to get used to was the slow and seemingly non-eventful nature of policy work, involving long hours of deskwork and academic research. Initially, Salelkar wasn’t particularly interested in disability issues. It was the conviction and energies of Rahul Cherian, another older alumnus of the National Law School of India University that drew her in. She started working with Cherian on a shadow report on mental health law in India, something that interested her as she had received treatment for mental health concerns in her own life.

Amba Salelkar

Amba Salelkar

Rahul Cherian envisaged the Inclusive Planet Centre for Disability Law and Policy as an offshoot of sorts from discussions which were taking place on inclusiveplanet.com. The latter was a social networking website which was accessible for persons with disabilities, and it was through this that Rahul was exposed to the gap in policy and legislative interventions on behalf of persons with disabilities. Rahul was heavily involved in the “right to read” movement, which was seeking an exception to copyright law to allow for published material to be converted into accessible formats, and found that there was a lot more to be achieved when it came to advocacy under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities….”

After Cherian’s death in February 2013, she came to lead the organisation. Apart from work in the legislative domain, trying to influence bureaucrats and legislators, Salelkar’s advocacy operations take her to teaching disability law to a series of concerned groups. Her objective is to breathe life into a legal imagination of a person with disability as a citizen, a professional, a worker, a consumer, and a service-receiver. She attempts to equip people like caregivers with tools from the Constitution (like fundamental rights) that can be used to their benefit. For instance, understanding the right to equality and the vast jurisprudence under Article 21 (right to life) and other constitutional law principles including the tradition of courts having used international conventions as the Supreme Court did in the Vishaka judgment, can be used for strategic litigation.

“Some people are fascinated by the law….Some people are jaded. They say the law promised us so much, especially with the 1995 Act, and it never delivered… My job is give them a realistic perspectives on the things that a legal avenue can offer. I don’t want to give people too much hope….My job is to tell them you may be right, but it doesn’t mean you will get a judgment in your favour….”

Salelkar sees her role as having live intersections with other rights-based movements – especially, queer and feminist movements, recognising the absence of support within the legal and judicial system for a category of person that does not match the standardised legal imagination of the ‘normal’ person. Disturbing the ‘normal’ is at the core of her long journey within and without the law.

We will continue talking about Narasappa and Salelkar as we look at their institutional energies in a larger ecosystem of policy reform.

(Atreyee Majumder is an anthropologist. She teaches at the School of Development, Azim Premji University.)

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Arvind Narrain and Usha Ramanathan – an uncertain unfolding of professional destiny

AtreyeeMajumder_CraftingLawCareers

Modern India has witnessed many public lives arranged around the vocation of a lawyer. We find repeatedly that many people with strong public voices within native debates about social reform and in striking conversation with imperial forces are lawyers.

The lawyering profession has had several new influences in the current socio-economic milieu in India, not least significant of which has been the opening of the economy in 1991, and the emergence of a range of collaborative lawyering firms and other institutions that assist that range of new private enterprises. A large number of young minds are directed to legal education and the lawyering profession to enter these channels of lawyering services to assist the expanding business arena.

Exploring the terms on which the vocation is practised, I reached out to four legal professionals who have run very different combinations of litigation, advocacy, research, and teaching in their professional lives. These were professionals who obtained their law degrees before and after the cusp of 1991. Harish Narasappa and Arvind Narrain got their degrees in the mid and late 90s, and Amba Salelkar got hers in the 2000s. The three of them got their degrees at the National Law School of India University, which led the trend in producing five-year-law graduates who penetrated the new avenues of the legal profession in the post-1991 era. Usha Ramanathan took her law degree in the late seventies in Chennai, followed it up with an LLM in Nagpur, and found herself visiting the Supreme Court and Indian Law Institute regularly, in the early eighties.

(Clockwise, from top) Amba Salelkar, Usha Ramanathan, Arvind Narrain, and Harish Narasappa

A most senior law researcher

I find it instructive to use Usha’s legal biography to sketch out the contours of what it might mean to be a lawyer by vocation, in India, across the last two decades. We know that a large number of professional channels are now open for people with law degrees to pursue in the shaping of a career – between corporate firms, tradition court practice, tribunal practice, NGOs, policy think tanks, and in-house legal work within companies. Having begun at a time where most of these institutions were absent or present in smaller scale, Ramanathan found herself hovering around a range of judicial spaces in Delhi in the eighties, waiting for her ‘impulse to settle’. She turns a combination of humility and curiosity into a toolkit.

Her first job is as a copy-editor at the Eastern Book Company in Lucknow. She edited Upendra Baxi’s books Indian Supreme Court and Politics and Crisis of the Indian Legal System. She interacted with Justices Krishna Iyer and Bhagwati and read indiscriminately at the Indian Law Institute. She joined a team brought together by Professor Chhatrapati Singh from the Indian Law Institute that travelled through Tamil Nadu collecting data on wastelands. As a by-stander in a child rights case, she helped put together a report on children of prostitutes which was submitted to the chair of the court-appointed committee. She went along with a group comprising different civil society actors to Uttarkashi after the earthquake of 1991 and helped put together a report. These were vastly different issues. Over time, the overarching question that came to inform her work was about the nature of poverty and impact of legal institutions on it. Thus, slowly acquainting herself with the skills of law-informed research, she shaped a profession that she has come to call ‘law researcher’ – someone who collected facts, reported back with data and insight to judicial and administrative bodies, and discussed these insights in the public domain. Along the way, she collected a Delhi University PhD, but still, does not consider herself an academic. Her colleagues joke with her saying at least she should call herself a ‘Senior Law Researcher’.

Ramanathan’s more recent writings and energies have been around the Unique Identification Number and reflections on the thirtieth anniversary of the Bhopal disaster. She is clearly one of the most energetic legal intellectuals of today’s India, someone whose thought and writing forms an important bridge between the theory and the practice of law. She remains steadfastly distant from institutional folds though, in an attempt to conserve her freedom.

Court work, public engagement, and fact-finding

We find the other legal professionals who start their careers a decade or more after Ramanathan, also making creative endeavours to juggle various institutional roles. Narrain came back from Warwick after a Masters, and got involved with founding the Alternative Law Forum in 2002, on the heels of the Gujarat riots. Initially an inchoate space where public interest law would be practiced and researched, an incident of two sex workers being picked up by the police in Bangalore on New Year’s Eve, propelled him and his colleagues to appear in court and argue a bail petition — quite a different route into courts from the usual ones taken by young lawyers to learn courtcraft. His work veered into the realm of sexuality rights and eventually the long drawn judicial battle over the constitutional legitimacy of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code. A political stance, a legal skill, and the presence of a professional and intellectual space lent to the emergence of this wide public and judicial debate over sexuality rights. Narrain cites the example of Gandhi’s lawyering to show the main tenets of human rights law practice – courtwork, engagement with the wider public, and fact-finding activities.

I find it important to see Narrain’s and Ramanathan’s sensibilities in consonance – the attempt to create and retain an inchoateness in their early career. Both are convinced that they wish to intervene in the legal domain, in public interest, but the exact methods and content emerge over a set of serendipitious meetings and events (though in Narrain’s case the organisational initiative was an important milestone). It is their patience and ability to handle an uncertain unfolding of a professional destiny that should be valuable for young lawyers and law students to learn from, if not emulate. In a series of essays over the next few weeks, I will juxtapose these four legal personalities to show the different ways of crafting one’s presence and influence in legal arenas – in courts, in the public domain, in advocacy with governments, in academia.

(Atreyee Majumder is an anthropologist. She teaches at the School of Development, Azim Premji University.)