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Does the 8220;awesome majesty of the law8221; demand the artificial prop of archaic usage? We think not. India, as a republic, should have long dispensed with the colonial practice of referring to its high court and Supreme Court judges as Your Lordship. The respect due to our judges must rest on rather more surer foundations than terms of address that have lost their relevance. It is appropriate, therefore, that the Bar Council of India has just resolved to replace the current 8216;Your Lordship8217; with the far more suitable 8216;Mr Judge8217; or 8216;Sir8217;. We hope that this initiative will not meet with the fate of earlier attempts at such reform. The process will be greatly expedited if the judiciary lends support to such a resolution, and there is no reason why it should not, given that the Supreme Court has itself advocated such a move.

In many ways a term like 8216;Your Lordship8217; signifies the stasis at the heart of a judicial system. A noted British judge once observed that his country8217;s judicial institutions, like old clocks, need to be set to true time. This observation holds equally good for India. Unsurprisingly, one of the dominant sentiments that emerged at the recent conference of chief ministers and chief justices of high courts in New Delhi was the need to speed up the judicial process and make it more in sync with a country in the throes of change. This would demand not just judicial but

legal reform, including the energetic weeding out of anachronistic legislation. But, as chief ministers from all over the country had argued at the conference, hastening the pace of delivering justice is a step that can no longer brook delay.

Achieving this has both technical and substantive dimensions. In the first category would fall initiatives like the more systematic introduction of info-tech into judicial functioning. But substantive reform would need to tackle issues like corruption in the judiciary and the overstretched system of justice delivery. If there are only 10-15 judges for a million of the country8217;s population, should we really be surprised that there are at present 35.21 lakh cases pending in our high courts, besides the 2.56 crore pending in our lower courts, as the chief justice of India has just reminded us?