Post-modern Legal India: Employment Opportunities

The staggering number of pending cases and the rising vacancies in lower judiciary are stifling India’s justice delivery system. What is the way out?

- Avik Muukherji

Modern societies differ from all forms of pre-modern ones in one significant way: to tweak a Marxian adage, it is in the “withering away” of society itself from pre-modern ‘social’ to post modern ‘individualistic’ entities that the change is most stark. The family is no longer the unit in modern societies; the individual is. The thinking is no longer grounded in and dominated by duties; individual freedoms, rights and claims dominate the thought of postmodern actors. The community no longer settles disputes; specially constituted disputes resolution forums such as courts and tribunals do. The upshot of this dramatic change is that aspirational and rights-conscious individuals have willy-nilly placed themselves at the disposal of a class of professionals who either dispense justice or who help those in the business of dispensing justice.

Pendency of Cases

If there is one thing that has outstripped the rise of the legal profession, it has been the saturation of courts by litigation. The saturation soon became so unmanageable that tribunals were set up to try subject-matter specific disputes. Though disparaged by legal purists, this “tribunalisation” of the justice delivery mechanism is today not just a necessity but also the only way in which justice had any hope of being delivered.