Honourable people

Hassan Kamal Wattoo

The writer is a lawyer.

JUDGES are strange, fascinating characters.

Every morning, they don colour-coded robes, walk into their workplace
with sherwani-clad chaperones, and look down from elevated seats at
rooms full of supplicants. Once court is over, they disappear behind the
same closed doors they entered from, not to be seen again till the next
session. This vanishing act, along with the other idiosyncrasies, isn’t
accidental. Vast amounts are spent each year on maintaining the spectacle
that judges are not mere people and courts are not mere buildings.

Separate entrances and walkways ensure no one catches a glimpse of

them. To the public, their lordships materialise out of thin air, dispense
justice, and then return to whichever higher realm they had descended
from. The undertones are unmistakable — that the man in the robe is not
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 human. He is a living embodiment of the law, existing solely to dispense
justice. Blind to every external consideration. And because his word is
final, he must be infallible.

This is, of course, complete nonsense. Judges across the globe are regular
human beings with a job to do. Still, nobody challenges the illusion.
Because it’s a prerequisite of any functioning society to believe in things
that exist only in its peoples’ collective imagination, like culture and
etiquettes. Judges are not infallible beings divinely ordained with the
power to bestow justice, but society operates with the assumption that they
are, because that’s the best option we’ve got. Adhering to social constructs
may seem silly, but the alternative (lawless anarchy) isn’t much nicer.

Judges across the globe are regular human beings.

What’s often forgotten is that the judge is meant to be in on the joke. But as
any practising lawyer will tell you, years of life as his lordship can take its
toll. In a 2017 essay titled ‘Judges as bullies’, Georgetown law professor
Abbe Smith proposes that a perpetual power imbalance and daily life that
consists of people bowing and scraping before them can convince some
judges that they’re above the law. And while everything said so far could be
equally true abroad, you can rest assured that this phenomenon’s Pakistani
equivalent is on steroids.

Consider last month, when some honourable lordships were caught using
the influence of their office to try and procure VVIP tickets to PSL. The
reason you didn’t see many lawyers commenting on this is that they’d be
crazy to. Power imbalances are too great and egos too fragile for a culture
of honest, critical discourse to even take root.

This pattern extends to criticism of judgements. Today, judges can rewrite

the Constitution, wrap the daylight robbery of democratic rights in
complex legalese, and most of those who understand what’s happening
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 will struggle to muster a statement stronger than ‘though his lordship is
very brilliant, I humbly disagree’.

If legal experts abdicate their responsibility of honest critique in the

interest of politeness, they leave a vacuum that is inevitably filled by
uninformed vitriol. The many judges sane enough to appreciate well-
reasoned criticism will be deprived of it, and the legal system will find itself
in a never-ending cycle of sycophantism and mediocrity, while the public
loses whatever faith it had left in everyone involved.

In a judgement recently, the Supreme Court held that the prefix

‘honourable’ should not be used for inanimate objects, like courts. More
importantly, it observed that the excessive use of honorifics (like hon’ble,
learned, sir, lordship, etc) served as a substitute for meaningful arguments.
The conclusion: “we expect litigants, counsel, and judges … to ensure
clarity, brevity and to avoid the perception of being obsequious.”

The scope of this judgment is precise, the need for it long overdue, and the
message clear: Pakistan’s legal system needs to cut down on the fluff and
flattery. Respect for constitutional bodies and civility in discourse is
unquestionable. But you can’t clear a 50,000-case backlog if you’re
imposing the need to punctuate every breath with superfluous niceties. In
the resultant inefficiency, it is regular litigants who suffer most.

Focusing on words may seem needlessly pedantic; but small choices add
up, and over decades, they contribute to culture. Why, for example, should
the Supreme Court be referred to as ‘honourable’ if the National Assembly
is not? Is the Senate not honourable? Courts in the US, UK, and even the
Hague are not referred to with this title. Are we claiming to be more
honourable than them?

Well, in our case, it was an honourable court of very honourable people

that murdered Bhutto, betrayed the Constitution it swore an oath to
uphold, went through a brief dam-engineer phase, and found multiple
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 occasions to sell its soul to dictators.

If that is what the actualisation of this word looks like, maybe we’re far
better off without it.

The writer is a lawyer.

Twitter: @hkwattoo1

Published in Dawn, March 19th, 2023

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