Michaeljit Sandhu

2024 Temple Bar Scholar Report

Three postcards from legal London, with some scribbled notes on the back.

First, at the Inns.  On one side: a sculpture, a conference room, and a plaque.  At Lincoln’s Inn, an imposing bust of Pakistan’s founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, stares out at a library of studying students and hard-at-work barristers.  At Inner Temple, beneath the busy dining hall, sits a meeting room dedicated to Gandhi, complete with a description of his sedition convictions (against “the Government established by Law in British India”), his subsequent disbarment, and his posthumous readmission.  At Middle Temple, not far from huge hanging portraits of British monarchs, a plaque with golden script commemorates the five American members who signed the Declaration of Independence and the seven who signed the Constitution (including two who would go on to serve as Supreme Court justices in the new United States).

On the other side: grappling with the incongruity.  Dear [], Why am I surprised that these centers of British legal life, the training grounds for British barristers, are celebrating members who challenged British rule?  Like Gandhi, Jinnah, and the leaders of the American revolution, scores of anti-colonial leaders across Asia, Africa, and the Americas trained as lawyers at home, qualified as barristers in London, and then used the language of law to undercut British rule upon their return.  Many made similar arguments: we are better upholders of the law than our violent and exploitative British rulers.  So, at the Inns, I am tempted to a too pat conclusion.  Perhaps, these memorials make it possible to see how law can become its own empire; harder to glimpse are the injustices it can enable.  (As Michel-Rolph Trouillot insists, commemorations construct and conceal history even when claiming merely to recount it.)  And yet: today, English precedent and practice plays an outsized role in American legal debates, and hundreds of lawyers from postcolonial states, including India and Pakistan, still report to the Inns for training.  Across the former colonies, the “rule of law” remains a rallying cry, even as it continues to evade easy definition.  As if to counteract my certainty, the Jinnah bust includes a description of its provenance: “On the occasion of the 70th Independence anniversary of Pakistan presented . . . on behalf of the Government and people of Pakistan.”

Second, in court.  On one side: a large room, plain to the point of banality.  The ceiling is low, the light artificial, the wood soft and blond.  There are plugs and screens at nearly every seat; TVs on stands are scattered across the room.  At one end, a scattering of chairs for the press and public.  At the other, attached to the wall behind a raised but otherwise unadorned bench, a subtle representation of the Royal Coat of Arms.  This is far from the neo-gothic grandeur of the Royal Courts of Justice, just up the road, or the solemn air of the Old Bailey, just down it.  Some of the barristers and judges who practice here suggest it looks more like a quotidian place of commerce, a conference room or convention hall, than a court.

On the other side: reflections on litigation.  Dear [], In October, I spent a few days attending one of the largest trials of the legal year in the Rolls Building, courtroom 15.  The case pitted an airline leasing company from Ireland against competing groups of international insurers in a dispute over who, if anyone, should cover losses for airplanes held in Russia after the invasion of Ukraine.  It is part of a wave of litigation in the London commercial courts that, the Financial Times reports, has led to “a fees bonanza;” one barrister estimated a million pounds a day was being spent on the silks and juniors stuffed into the packed courtroom or forced to listen from outside.  (The same paper notes that, according to the head of the Law Society and the Lady Chief Justice of England and Wales, the criminal legal system is on “the brink of collapse” from lack of funding.)  Still, skeptical as I am of the efforts of deracinated capital to find ever more desirable places to conduct its business, I admit what I saw is an effective advertisement: the lawyers were understated, dry, clever, well-prepared; the judge conscientious and restrained; only the air conditioning was less than reliable.

Finally, to Westminster.  On one side: a shot from above.  Arrayed around Parliament Square, with its smattering of statutes, from Churchill and Gandhi to Smuts and Mandela, are the landmark institutions of British political life.  To the east, the Palace of Westminster, home for centuries to the House of Commons and the House of Lords.  To the north, offices of the Government, including, a few blocks on, the Prime Minister’s offices at 10 Downing Street.  To the south, Westminster Abbey, the site of coronations for William the Conqueror in the 11th century and King Charles in the 21st.  And hugging the west side of the square, in what was formerly the Middlesex Guildhall, sits the relatively anonymous home of the United Kingdom Supreme Court.

On the other: a hasty comparison.  Dear [], Unlike most institutions of government in the United Kingdom, the Supreme Court is a more recent invention than its American counterpart: it separated from the House of Lords only fifteen years ago.  (Put another way, three of the nine justices on our high court have served for longer than the U.K. Supreme Court has existed.)  As you might expect, I am struck more by what it has declined to do than what it has accomplished: by the time our Court reached fifteen, its unelected members had already claimed the power to strike down democratically enacted laws; no such prerogative of judicial review appears forthcoming here.  Indeed, despite many polite inquiries about what the British can learn from us, the lessons they have taken thus far appear to be primarily negative: the twelve justices who serve on the U.K. Supreme Court are subject to mandatory retirement at 75; they are respected public servants, but far from the limelight; they eschew rigid textualism and reject originalism.  Is it too simplistic, perhaps a bit sentimental, to say that I’ll miss it here when I’m gone?