NATURAL AND SOCIAL JUSTICE. By R.G. Chaturvedi.

Second
edition (1975). Law Book Company, Allahabad. Pp. 639+xlii. Rs. 50/-

LAW, AS Benjamin Cardozo rightly observed, is an instrument of social

engineering, and an effective instrument at that. The nub of the matter is that
law, as a subject of discussion, has ceased to be an ivory tower obstruction
and it has come out of its natural habitat, namely, the law schools and the
legal institutions. Today, it is for the law to try and catch up with the ever-
fleeting shadows of the needs of society and it is not for the society to adapt
itself to the law. As Lon. L. Fuller says in his Anatomy of the Law that

the law can appear as the highest achievement of civilization,

liberating for creative use human resources otherwise dedicated to
destruction. It can be seen as the foundation of human dignity and
freedom, our best hope for a peaceful world. In man's capacity to
perceive and legislate against his own defects, we can discern his
chief claim to stand clearly above the animal level....1
A shift in mood and all this bright glitter surrounding the law can
collapse into dust. Law then becomes man's badge of infamy, his
confession of ineradicable perfidy. To saythat man can reshape
himself by rules is to confess that he is a creature who has to put a
halter on himself, before he can live safely with his fellows.1

In countries with democratic forms of government, public opinion and

the law act and react with each other. Sometimes, the law sets the pace
and public opinion catches up and sometimes when the law lags behind,
public opinion brings about the required change in the law.
Today, with the emergence of sociological jurisprudence, what was
formerly held sacrosanct has come to be regarded as shibboleth. The grow­
ing point of constitutional law is seen in the area of personal rights vis-a-vis
common good. To the tribe of jurists or sociologists and philosophers whose
'visions are keyed to eternity beyond the hooting throng and the tumult of
the selfish', the attempted socio-economic law reforms may seem trite and
ignoble. Though justice cannot be defined in a nutshell, nor can it be
encased in the strait-jackets of an inflexible formula or dogma, one can say
that justice is the endeavour that achieves just results. In this endeavour
judges should be alert to social realities and responsive to social changes.
Whatever be the ideology of a political state—capitalist, socialist or
communist—'the general prevailing common measure among all these diffe­
rent ideologies is that the state is today no longer a tax-collecting state or
a police state, but a service state or a welfare state. The increasingly active
and creative role of the conscious law-making instrumentalities of the state
i —•■ — " - "

1. Lon L. Fuller, Anatomy of the Law 3 (1968^.

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310 JOURNAL OF THE INDIAN LAW INSTITUTE [Vol. 20: 2

coupled with the legislatures being heavily at work flanked on both sides
by a plurality of administrative tribunals and agencies, actively moulds and
modulates the socio-economic conduct of the people. As Chief Justice
Rajamannar of the Madras High Court observed quoting Aldous Huxley :
Many of our old ideas must be re-translated, so to speak, into a new
language. The democratic idea of freedom, for instance, must loose
its 19th century meaning of individual liberty in the economic sphere
and become adjusted to the new conceptions of social duties and
responsibilities.
The concept of socio-economic justice is a living concept and gives
substance to the rule of law and meaning and significance to the ideal of a
welfare state. The Indian Constitution is an illustration of the forces at
work in socio-economic jurisprudence. It sets out the directive principles
of state policy fundamental to the governance of the country and spells
out "a social order in which justice, social, economic and political, shall
inform all the institutions of national life". The zeal and interest in the
positive rule of law and social justice in the modern India is reflected in the
quantitative and qualitative legislative output. Attempts are being made
in our country to construct a just and equitable social set-up on the
anarchist and fascist backwaters of a caste-ridden, strife-torn Indian
society.
It is in this background that one has to view the book entitled
Natural and Social Justice by R.G. Chaturvedi. Part I of the book is
devoted to the treatment of natural justice. Chaturvedi in his opening
chapter gives us an idea of justice starting from the premise of the harmony
of the individual in society. The second chapter captioned "Concept of
Natural Justice" deals, inter alia, with the implication of philosophy in
natural justice and takes within the fold of discussion the Vedic and the
Greek concepts of cosmic justice, the Roman concept of ratio naturalis, the
concept of providential justice propounded by Locke and Kant, the Hindu
theory of karma, and justice as punishment for the sin in the Bible. In
chapter III, the sanctity of the concept is dealt with and chapter IV
spells out the minimum of the concept. In the succeeding chapters in
part I, determination of rights has been delineated, administrative and
quasi-judicial fields distinguished, bias and hearing analysed and explained,
exceptions and alternatives to natural justice pointed out, and the residuary
aspects of natural justice highlighted. A major part of the discussion is a
tour de force of theoretical explanation for the concept. The author, no
doubt, marshals an impressive array of facts and arguments to underscore
the necessity for, and importance of, the observance of the principles of
natural justice. In modern law, a major chunk of which is taken up by
administrative law, the right to a fair hearing is given great importance,
and rightly too. This is known as the doctrine of audi alteram partem, or
the principles of natural justice. The prevailing ethos of the courts in

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1978] BOOK REVIEWS 311

India in the post-Constitution period inclines a judge to manifest a personal

predilection for the observance of the principles of natural justice.
The author has done well to discuss the leading decisions like
A. K. Gopalan*; Province of Bombay v. Khusaldas3 ; Sadhu Singh v.
Delhi Administration*; Union of India v. J.N. Sinha5; Nageshwararao v.
State of Andhra Pradesh**, King v. Secretary of State for Home Affairs1;
Hari v. Deputy Commissioner of Police8; Ridge v. Baldwin9 ; Franklin
v. Minister of Town and Country Planning10; Chaturbhai v. Union of India11;
B. Johnson & Co. v. Minister of Health12; R. v. Manchester Legal Aid
Committee13 ; Gullapalli Nageswara Rao v. Andhra Pradesh State Road
Transport Corporation1*; Nasiruddin v. Union of India15 ; A. K. Kraipak
v. Union of India16 ; State of Orissa v. Beena Pani Dei11; and Regina v.
Criminal Injuries Compensation Court, Ex-parte Lein1B. The observation
made by him that in Ram Gopal ChaturvedVs case19 Bachawat, J., was mak­
ing an attempt to gear back the judicial advance made in Kraipak?s case20
and to fly from the very concept of administrative fairness in holding that
the principles of natural justice were not attracted in that case as the
appellant had no vested right to office, is correct.
In the discussion of "Determination of Rights" in chapter V,
Chaturvedi encompasses questions affecting rights, philosophy of rights,
punitive determination of rights and fairness as requisite. The author
concludes that the philosophy of rights is based on a clear conception of
the interests, that the basis of justice is the corpus of rights, that in order to
attract the principles of natural justice, it is the determination of some
rights simpliciter that is to be proved and not that the right determined is
of a fundamental nature of an enforceable type or of a vested kind. But
regarding the other topics in the chapter, Chaturvedi does not express his
own opinion. The absence of a textural argument detracts from the merits
of the discussion, which is supplemented by a generous array of reported
2. A.K. Gopalan v. State of Madras, A.L.R. 1950 S.C. 27,
3. A.LR. 1950 S.C. 222.
4. A I R . 1966 S.C. 91.
5. A.I.R. 1971 S.C. 40.
6. A.I.R. 1959 S.C, 1376.
7. (1923) 2 K.B. 361.
8. A.I.R. 1956 S.C. 559.
9. (1964) A.C. 40.
10. (1948) A.C. 87.
11. A.I.R. 1960 S.C. 424.
12. (1947) 2 All E.R. 395.
13. (1952) 1 All E.R. 480.
14. A.I.R. 1959 S.C. 308.
15. A.I.R. 1966 M.P. 346.
16. A.LR. 1970 S.C. 150.
17. A.LR. 1967 S.C. 1269.
18. (1967)2Q.B.864.
19. Ram Gopalw. State of M.P., A.I.R, 1970 S.C. 158.
20. Supra note 16.

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 312 JOURNAL OF THE INDIAN LAW INSTITUTE [Vol. 20 : 2

cases. The achievement in this chapter is a detailed discussion, though

narrowly oriented, of determination of rights. What is missing in this
discussion is a penetrating analysis based on a comparative approach. The
catalogue of the facts of leading cases and the reproduction of the ipsissima
verba of the judiciary per se does not add any credit to the book.
In the chapter dealing with the administrative and quasi-judicial func­
tions, the author has quoted profusely from several decisions like Mahabir
Prasad v. State of U.P.21; State of West Bengal v. Smt. Manish Maity22;
Shell Company of Australia v. Federal Commissioner of Taxation23; Jaswant
Sugar Mills Ltd. v. Lakshmi Chand2*; Lata Shri Bhagwan v. Ram Chand25;
Attorney-General for Australia v. The Queen and the Boiler Makers' Society
of Australia26 etc. To find out whether the administrative order impugned
can be passed only by observing the principles of natural justice, the real
test is to distinguish cases where the administrator is required to discharge
a function and cases in which he is required to exercise a given power
of an individual in view of the facts particularly attending that individual's
own case.
In the chapter on "Analysis of Bias," the author spends a dispropor­
tionate amount of time and space on judicial dicta, as though by virtue of
this, the principle of bias and the scope for interference with the same will
suddenly be revealed and the scattered fragments of the judicial dicta will
neatly fall into pieces. One has to plough through vast tracts of verbiage
representing the judicial observations in a vain attempt to discover a clean
formulation of the principles. The chapter dealing with analysis of hearing
gobbles up seventy-eight pages, but the ideas conveyed therein get channelled
into the same general pattern. A cynic might call this getting into a rut or
even say that the legal brain showed a tendency to get fossilised. Chatur­
vedi, in effect, uses the sober pronouncements of judges as the central
theme of his discussion on the analysis of hearing. The scattered obser­
vations incorporated into this study can at best confer on this part of the
book the status of a compilation. Apart from a tantalisingly short discus­
sion in chapter IX, 'malafides* did not get any attention worth the name from
the author.
Part II of the book is devoted to social justice. Social justice is strictly
concerned
with negativing or minimising the effects of injustice inherent in the
distribution of natural talents and environmental advantages to
establish a rational method of distributing social roles and the equa­
lised distribution of the opportunities and rewards of society.
21. A I.R. 1970 S.C. 1302.
22. A.LR. 1971 Cal. 281.
23. (1931) A.C. 275.
24. A.LR. 1963 S.C. 677.
25. (1965)IIS.C.W.R. 318
26. (1957) A.C. 288.

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1978] BOOK REVIEWS 313

In removing the awesome inexorability of justice which could be seen

at many levels of the law, from the exercise of police discretion to the
adjudicatory role of the courts, social justice has got a pivotal part to play.
Only if social and natural justice are allowed to have free play in the life of
a community can we respond to "the call for a cosmos regulated by law as
against a chaos abandoned to unlaw".
A democratic society must constantly question in order to seek the
truth. Thus, what Cohn called 'fact-skepticism' is an essential ingredient of
its approach to legal issues. As Grant Gilmore, Sterling Professor of Law
at the Yale Law School, says in his book with the intriguing caption The
Death of Contract :
Legal scholars generally agree that the theory of contract is dead
and mainly would argue that that ingenious invention of 19th century
theorists, carefully fabricated from bits and pieces of case-law, both
old and new, English and American, is no longer deserving of our
sustained attention as a worthy subject for serious study.
The static models which may be dear to the hearts of economists, are
not the kettle of fish of activist advocates.
In today's world is taking place what may be called the process of
doctrinal disintegration. The instinctive hope of the greatest system-
builders that the future development of the law could be, if not controlled,
at least channelled in an orderly and rational fashion is not completely
fulfilled. The static models kept dear by status-quoists are smashed into
smithereens by the active iconoclasts among the advocates. The discussion
of 'social justice' reveals a more analytical approach than was exhibited by
the author in part I of the book.
Chaturvedi traces the genesis of social justice from the civil society
and traverses the various and varying social rights which are subjected to
social control. The rendition is often stiff and mechanical, but what it
loses in that respect it more than makes up for in terminological accuracy
and semantic consistency. No doubt, the author surveys the field and
offers his readership a convenient capsule summary of the relevant back­
ground of the subject. Recent decisions have fathered several changes in
the content and connotation of the concept of social justice. The poten­
tially more comprehensive reach of statutory revision through legislative
process remains almost unnoticed. But the effective impact of court-
required change is confined to a small target. The dominance of judicial
activism in this field is, however, to be welcomed.
Chaturvedi has provided the readers with some provocative analysis
and certain proposals which are challengeable. This part of the work is
successful in sustaining the readers' interest throughout and provides a
model of lucidity and vigorous argument.
While dealing with the concept of social justice vis-a-vis our Constitu­
tion, the author has been brief, and to some extent bold, in his discussion.

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A critique on the Golak Nath case27 could have been furnished by

the author highlighting the dangerous propensities—Justice Subba Rao's
decision held out for the future. State of Madras v. V.G. Rao2H and
Chandra Bhavan Boarding & Lodging case could, inter alia, have been
given a place of prominence in the discussion and it certainly is an omission
of a serious nature not to have done it. Equally inexcusable is the omission
of Chaturvedi to dwell on the concrete contributions to the evolution of
the concept of social justice by those judicial activists in India, namely
Justice P.B. Gajendragadkar and Justice M.C. Chagla. The discussion on
social justice could have been an outstanding contribution had the author
collected more material and subjected his material to a more thorough and
penetrating analysis and been more comprehensive in his treatment both
of the judicial process and the context in which it operates. Nonetheless,
it must be admitted that Chaturvedi's book contains much that is interest­
ing and not otherwise accessible.
Finally, the arrival of a new book is generally greeted with enthu­
siasm by our legal community. Though the book cannot claim to have
the major thrust of an analytical text laced with original thinking, the legal
readership will have no reason to be disappointed with Chaturvedi.
In reality, as the leopard is a prince among cats, so is Chaturvedi
among exponents of natural and social justice and his book bears this out.
One can in all probability admire a leopard and commend it to the admira­
tion of others, even if one does not like its spots.
S. Parameswaran*

27. Golak Nath v. State of Punjab, A I R. 1967 S C. 1643.

28. A.LR. 1952 SC. 196.
* M Sc., LL.B, A.M.B.I.M., Advocate

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