A Law Scholar Takes the Idea of Law Apart
For over two hours on the Nous Podcast, host Asad Ashraf pressed legal scholar Dr. Nizamuddin Ahmad Siddiqui on a question that sounds simple only until someone tries to answer it: what is law? Siddiqui, who has taught law at Jindal Global Law School and wrote his doctoral thesis on legal theory without citing a single case, spent the conversation refusing easy answers. His central claim, returned to from a dozen directions, is that law is inseparable from politics, that authority rather than pure reason is what makes law binding, and that justice is best understood not as a fact but as an assumption people make when a dispute is finally settled. The conversation ranged from Aristotle's theological inheritance in legal thought to the Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam bail orders, from Harvard Law School's nineteenth-century pedagogical revolution to the 1994 dissent that nearly upended the Babri Masjid litigation. Threading through all of it was a single argument: that Indian citizens who expect courts to deliver a neutral, apolitical justice are misunderstanding what law has ever been.
Law Depends on Who Is Asking
Siddiqui's opening move was to insist that "law" means different things depending on who is using the word. For a judge, he said, law is the source used to settle a dispute placed before the bench. For a lawyer, law is raw material to be converted into a persuasive argument — Siddiqui was blunt that "justice is not important" to a practising advocate, whose task is to convince the judge, not to achieve some abstract fairness. For a law teacher, law is a body of philosophy: its nature, its relationship to morality, its historical sources. For an ordinary citizen, law collapses into an expectation of justice — people go to court assuming an outcome will feel fair, and are often disappointed. And for government, law is authority and validation: the mechanism through which a ruling party converts its will into something binding, while an opposition's role, in Siddiqui's framing, is either to genuinely block a bill or to force debate on its costs. These are not competing errors to be resolved into one true definition, he argued — they are simply different, equally legitimate vantage points on the same object.
Justice Is Not Automatic — It Is an Assumption
The most striking argument Siddiqui made concerned the gap between settling a dispute and delivering justice. When a court resolves a case, he said, it is answering a question or settling a disagreement between parties — but that resolution is not justice itself; it is only the occasion on which people choose to believe justice has occurred. "Justice is your assumption," he said, tying this to the structural requirement that disputes reach a final, unappealable authority before anyone treats them as resolved. He drew a direct parallel to Islamic theological discourse, where ultimate justice is deferred to the Day of Judgment, when God's decision is final in a way no human ruling can be. Law, in this reading, behaves like theology: both are premised on someone holding final interpretive authority, and both require believers — or citizens — to treat that authority's word as the last word. This is also, he argued, why "justice must not only be done but be seen to be done" is not a throwaway maxim but a structural truth: justice carries an ineliminable element of public perception, which is one reason courts sometimes shape rulings, consciously or not, to satisfy a sense of collective conscience rather than a case's narrow merits — even as courts like the one that decided the Afzal Guru case explicitly denied doing so.
Positivism's Long Shadow, From Plato to Rawls
Siddiqui traced contemporary Indian jurisprudence back to a fork in Greek philosophy. Socrates, he said, encouraged questioning and thereby multiplied opinions; Plato, alarmed that a society of competing opinions could not agree on what was right, argued instead for a single, authoritative opinion. That lineage, he argued, runs through Auguste Comte's positivism, is adopted by Jeremy Bentham, and hardens into John Austin's "command of the sovereign" — the idea that law is simply whatever the person holding authority commands — before arriving at H.L.A. Hart and the present day. Siddiqui set this "positive law," created by human institutions wielding authority, against two other categories drawn from the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius: natural law, embedded in human nature and requiring no legislation (nobody needs a statute to know murder is wrong), and divine law, found in scripture. Modern constitutional democracies formally sideline divine law and lean on positive law, he said, but they cannot escape natural law's moral residue, which is why constitutional systems develop doctrines like "constitutional morality" — a fusion of positive law and moral principle that determines, for instance, that legislatures should not dictate judicial outcomes.
On the specific question of justice's content, Siddiqui walked through John Rawls's "veil of ignorance" — deciding a case as though one knew nothing about the parties' identities — before noting Amartya Sen's critique, developed partly with Martha Nussbaum, that neutrality without attention to people's actual capabilities is hollow: distributing five kilograms of rice to every poor family, regardless of whether that family has two members or ten, is not justice merely because it is uniform.
Why Law Cannot Escape Politics
Asked directly how order, power and social compromise fit into an idea of law that is supposedly about justice, Siddiqui answered that law is "inherently tied" to politics because its creation is inescapably political. Parliament, he said, is "a political institution" before it is a legal one, and the Constitution of India is "inherently a political document" that acquires legal force only because it commands validating agreement. Law-making requires representation, and representation requires the politics of identity — a principle Siddiqui used to explain why B.R. Ambedkar championed Dalit politics: without organised Dalit political assertion, Dalit interests would never translate into law. He extended the same logic to the dilution of Muslim political organisation in India, which he said has made law's relationship with Muslims progressively more ambiguous, and to the LGBTQ rights movement, whose visibility in public space — its own culture, language, flag and literature, built through Pride marches — became the precondition for its arguments gaining traction inside courtrooms. Groups that cannot mobilise politically, in his account, struggle to see their interests recognised as legal claims at all.
Layers of Subjectivity, From the FIR to the Bench
Siddiqui mapped subjectivity through the entire life cycle of a case rather than locating it only in judges. It begins, he said, with the police, who frame the initial charge and can do so fairly or with bias — for instance choosing whether to apply communal-rioting provisions. It continues through lower courts, where advocates sometimes manipulate filings for a fee, a practice he called common enough that "people need to accept" it as reality. It shows up in courtroom persuasion itself: senior advocates such as Kapil Sibal or Harish Salve command large fees not for their paperwork but for their "delivery" — reading a bench's mood, adjusting arguments to a particular judge's temperament, deploying literature or philosophy alongside law. And it appears, more quietly, in judges' own political leanings, which Siddiqui said remain far less openly discussed in India than in the United States or Britain, where a judge's ideological disposition is common knowledge.
He illustrated this with the Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam bail order, criticising the court's reasoning that releasing the accused could endanger witnesses — an argument, he said, that implicitly assumes guilt on a question the court had explicitly declined to decide. He offered a parallel critique of the 1994 Ismail Faruqui judgment's reasoning in the Ayodhya title dispute, in which the outer courtyard was treated as Hindu possession and the inner courtyard as "contested," with the contested status itself becoming the reason to award it to the Hindu side — a chain of reasoning he called "reading more than what it is," made possible only because the judiciary holds final interpretive authority. None of this, he stressed, means judgments are automatically unfair: subjectivity that is conscious of caste discrimination or social hierarchy, he said, can itself produce fairer outcomes.
Jurisdiction Is a Choice, Not a Given
One of Siddiqui's more technical but consequential points concerned jurisdiction — the question of whether a court has authority to decide a matter at all. He argued that courts, as a matter of legal theory, have no built-in hierarchy: a Supreme Court is not jurisdictionally "above" a district court, and in principle any court could take cognisance of any matter, a point he illustrated with the far-fetched but structurally real example that even a district court could technically issue a warrant against a foreign head of state. India's judicial hierarchy, he said, exists only because the Constitution constructed it that way, assigning constitutional matters to constitutional benches and appellate structure to the Supreme Court. He used the 2012 Italian Marines case — in which Indian jurisdiction over Italian naval officers accused of killing fishermen escalated into a diplomatic standoff eventually resolved through international arbitration — and the Ismail Faruqui presidential reference, in which the Supreme Court "respectfully declined to answer" whether the disputed Ayodhya site could be treated as the birthplace of Lord Ram, ruling that the question was not a legal one at all. Courts, in other words, decide the boundaries of their own power before they decide anything else, and there is no fixed external criterion for where those boundaries lie.
When the Judiciary and the Executive Collide
Much of the conversation's second half examined the elaborate choreography between judiciary and executive. Siddiqui described the collegium system — under which India's judiciary appoints its own judges — as a defensive assertion of institutional survival against an executive perceived as too interventionist, and noted that the 2015 National Judicial Appointments Commission Act was struck down as a result. He traced recurring friction to public sparring between the judiciary and figures such as former law minister Kiren Rijiju, who repeatedly criticised judges publicly before being moved out of the law ministry, and pointed to comparable tension involving former vice-president Jagdeep Dhankhar. His broader claim was that the three organs of state generally seek "symphony" rather than confrontation, tacitly allowing each other latitude to avoid friction that would damage the state's functioning — except in moments, like the NJAC case or the Kesavananda Bharati case on the basic structure doctrine, where the two sides go "face to face" and one must assert itself.
He applied the same logic to the controversy over large sums of cash discovered at a judge's residence, arguing that the judiciary avoided a police FIR by framing the episode as strictly a matter of "conduct of a judge," which only the judiciary itself may examine — building an internal inquiry whose report, he noted, was never made fully public, and stopping short of impeachment because pushing the confrontation further would have meant the judiciary and executive going directly head-to-head. Sealed-cover proceedings, he argued, work the same way: a mechanism for producing evidence while avoiding an open clash over how much the judiciary must disclose.
Dissent That Refuses to Disappear
Siddiqui gave particular weight to judicial dissent, explaining the mechanics of how benches of two, three or five judges reach majority and minority opinions, and insisting that a dissenting judgment, though never legally operative, still matters enormously. He recounted, drawing on an account by the legal writer Insia Vahanvati, the tense 1994 episode in which Justices A.M. Ahmadi and S.P. Bharucha dissented from a majority led by Justice M.N. Venkatachaliah in the Ismail Faruqui case, with Bharucha reportedly refusing a late-night phone call urging him to fall in line and declaring he did not want to become Chief Justice of India rather than sign an opinion he disagreed with. A dissent, Siddiqui argued, can become tomorrow's law if a future bench of equal or greater strength adopts its reasoning — which is why he considers the habit of treating dissents as mere footnotes a misunderstanding of how common-law systems actually evolve.
Teaching Law Versus Practising Law
Turning to legal education, Siddiqui traced the now-dominant case-study method to Christopher Columbus Langdell, the nineteenth-century Harvard Law School dean who, facing empty evening classrooms and students who saw law purely as apprenticeship, introduced the practice of teaching through compiled case law rather than abstract principle — a method so influential it was later adapted by Harvard Business School as the case-study method still used in business education. Yet Siddiqui was careful to distinguish jurisprudence from mere case law: jurisprudence, he said, is "the prudence of understanding law," encompassing logic, interpretive method and philosophy — thinkers like J.S. Mill and Rawls — in ways a courtroom, focused only on winning a live dispute, has no occasion to explore. His own doctoral dissertation on legal theory, he noted, ran to roughly two hundred and thirty pages without citing a single case. Teaching, he said, is "principle-centric," giving students the stability of settled concepts, while advocacy is an art of persuasion that can shift its argument within minutes depending on a bench's mood — a tension, he added, that leaves practising lawyers and legal academics chronically suspicious of each other's relevance.
A Promise Kept Selectively
Asked, in closing, whether Indian law today still carries the promise of justice or has simply become an "object of control," Siddiqui declined to give a single verdict. He compared the question to the common complaint that international law "doesn't exist" because of Gaza or Iran, arguing that critics who focus only on high-profile failures ignore that international law is followed by most countries most of the time — global trade, immigration regimes and diplomacy all depend on it functioning quietly. Indian courts, he argued, work the same way: the overwhelming majority of cases — company law, environmental law, labour law, service matters, immigration disputes — are decided without controversy, simply because they are not politically charged, and so never attract attention. It is the smaller set of cases sitting in genuinely grey, politically fraught territory — where identity, national security or majoritarian politics intrude — that produce the aberrations people remember. He pointed to disability-rights jurisprudence, credited substantially to former Chief Justice D.Y. Chandrachud, alongside procedural reforms such as live-streaming of hearings and a uniform citation system, as genuine institutional achievements existing alongside decisions on Gyanvapi and Ayodhya that drew heavy criticism. The honest answer, Siddiqui insisted, is neither wholesale faith nor wholesale cynicism, but a case-by-case, context-specific reckoning with an institution that is simultaneously legal, political and, in his account, inescapably human.
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