Listen to Bentham

MARCH 13: Jeremy Bentham was a legal and social reformer of the 19th century. His mummified body, appropriately dressed up with top hat an...

MARCH 13: Jeremy Bentham was a legal and social reformer of the 19th century. His mummified body, appropriately dressed up with top hat and all, sits in the lobby of University College, London, for all its faculty and students to see. What he wrote is relevant in the current climate of strikes by lawyers.

Bentham believed that it was in the interest of lawyers that as many men as possible should find it impossible to conduct their own legal affairs in order (as he put it) to maximise “that portion of the expense of litigation which goes into the lawyer’s pocket in the shape of lawyer’s profit”.

Bentham believed that the strategy adopted by lawyers was to make it impossible for non-lawyers to predict the decision likely to be made by a judge, and therefore force them to go to lawyers for advice! If non-lawyers did not go to lawyers, they would suffer severely. In order to maximise their power and influence, both in relation to the legislature and the people, lawyers employed terms and phrases which were intended to keep the people in a state of ignorance with reference to the law, and the rights and obligations created by it. In order to break the “sinister monopoly of lawyers”, Bentham even proposed that judges and advocates should belong to separate, mutually-exclusive professions, and that decisions of judges should be based on the “greatest happiness principle” since then it would be easier for citizens to anticipate a future decision, and conduct themselves accordingly. Citizens would then have less need to resort to professional lawyers.

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Bentham died in 1832, but what he wrote stirs the public imagination in Delhi and the rest of India in the year 2000.

Not unnaturally. In my practice of nearly 50 years at the Bar I have come to the conclusion that in a large number of cases (not all) trained judges (if driven to it) could decide without the “assistance” of the legal profession. I firmly believe that lawyers’ grievances (howsoever legitimate) cannot be and should not be visited on the litigant public if the current state of affairs continues we lawyers as a class will face a most uncertain, dispensable future.

The public perception of the practising lawyer is at a low ebb today the lowest in decades, I believe we should have some replica of the sitting mummy in all our law colleges and institutions of legal learning in order to instill in future members of the profession his important message: that law is a service oriented profession. As for the present members of the profession, right-thinking members of the public believe that we are beyond redemption.

The writer is an eminent lawyer