I strongly recommend to this blog The Indian Express’s Republic day special issue on the twenty court cases that have expanded the idea of India. Spread across six full pages, the special issue focuses on landmark cases, seen through the eyes of the petitioners/litigants/lawyers who made it happen.
Since, the rare photos are also a delight, I suggest the epaper version (if you click on the link, you will go to page one. The special issue starts on page 15 and ends on page 20.)
The issue was a result of a detailed in-house effort (with inputs from Sidharth Chauhan, and Vivek Reddy who also blogs here). I hope the choice of profilees sparks a raucous debate on this blog, while serving to inform (and entertain) millions of Indians less familiar with our Constitutional history.
I am a bit confused, was it supposed to be about the cases or the lawyers. Some of the individual pieces hardly mentioned anything about the cases they were professedly about. And Honestly quite a few of them were hardly landmark. I think the problem could have been solved had the editorial team come out exactly with what the intended to achieve out of the special issue. To me it seemed a half baked attempt to imitate the Times of India's Top 10 Lawyers list. Though I must confess that some of the pieces individually did for an interesting read, but as a whole the piece just could not stand up.
The article is about the lawyers who played a major role in the most prominent cases that shaped the Indian republic. There are a couple of aspects about the Indian Express special issue.
1)It would be a interesting to catalogue the contribution of academicians in the development of law in all these sixty years of the republic.
2) Prominent developments in Indian law post-independence are always attributed to advocates. However, any lawyer would acknowledge that the contribution of NGOS, academicians, non-lawyers, personalities from corporate India (especially in the field of corporate law, contract law), etc in the development of law in India has been immense. Why don't we acknowledge their contributions too?