The Advocate's Apprenticeship: A Supreme Court Lawyer on Craft, Fees and Citizenship

A factory dispute in Faizabad

Talha Abdul Rahman did not set out to become, in his own words, a "family advocate before he had even graduated." Growing up in Faizabad — the twin city of Ayodhya, a place he describes as tightly knit despite its outside reputation, where neighbours moved freely in and out of each other's homes — Rahman was steered, like many bright students of his generation, toward an engineering entrance exam. He chose law instead, against considerable resistance from a family of engineers and doctors who could not understand, as he told Nous, why someone doing well in maths would abandon it. His father, an engineer who ran a small factory in Faizabad, agreed only on the condition that his son attend nothing less than the best institution in the country.

The turn toward law solidified almost by accident. When Rahman was seven, a labour dispute at his father's factory — a worker's termination triggering a solidarity strike and conciliation proceedings — became a recurring worry discussed at home. Years later, as a law student at NALSAR Hyderabad, his father began forwarding him the same ongoing dispute, asking him to research the applicable law, photocopy the relevant material, and send back instructions with a covering letter for the family's actual lawyers to use. What began as filial duty became a genuine legal education: Rahman worked through labour law and tax law so thoroughly, to help his father navigate an income-tax dispute and VAT troubles alongside the labour case, that he won a gold medal in labour law at NALSAR and was appointed standing counsel for the Income Tax Department at the age of twenty-three or twenty-four — a credential he attributes directly to having effectively studied tax law as a teenager out of necessity rather than curriculum.

What Oxford taught him that law school didn't

After NALSAR, Rahman went to Oxford for a masters, funded by a scholarship, deliberately completing it before beginning full-time practice rather than after — a sequencing he now views with mixed feelings but doesn't regret. His account of the difference between Indian undergraduate legal education and an Oxford-style masters turned on a single distinction: Indian legal training, in his experience, spends most of its energy on what the law is, while a comparative masters programme is organised around why a rule developed the way it did in a given jurisdiction, and how the same problem was solved differently elsewhere. An Oxford tutor's job, he said, was less to teach content than to demolish the illusion of the reading list: "the reading list you've been given isn't a reading list — there are two thousand more articles beyond the twenty I happen to like. Go read." That posture, he argued, produces a different kind of lawyer: not someone trained to recite that a rule applies and a person is inside or outside it — "that's a legal technician's job" — but someone trained to interrogate whether a legal frame fits a given set of facts, where the frame is weak, and whether it should expand or contract. Lawyers, he said pointedly, are not mere spokespersons for their clients on an ethical view of the profession; alongside the obvious duty to assist law enforcement, a lawyer carries responsibility for the law's own development.

Rahman credited his NALSAR professor Amita Dhanda with first flagging, while he was still a student, that Indian law schools lack the classroom diversity they are meant to have — geographic, caste, religious, linguistic — without which, in his account, a classroom simply cannot generate the range of perspectives that legal argument about a genuinely diverse society requires. He extended the point further than his interviewer expected, arguing that faculty diversity matters just as much as student diversity, since teachers of similar backgrounds tend to reproduce their own experiences, and defending constitutional reservations in academic hiring as a legitimate, purposeful tool for bringing perspectives — on caste, religion, region — that are otherwise structurally absent from the room.

Why courts keep citing decades-old judgments

Pressed on why Indian courts often lean on precedents from the 1970s and 1980s rather than more recent reasoning, Rahman located the answer not in judicial conservatism but in the courtroom itself. Judgment writing, he argued, is downstream of argument: a judge builds substantially on what the advocates in front of them actually present, so the quality of precedent a court can draw on is capped by the quality of research and framing lawyers bring into the room. If law schools fail to train advocates who can locate the weaknesses in an existing legal frame — where it should expand, where it should contract — then courts, lacking better material to work with, will keep falling back on whatever settled the question decades ago. Elevating "tomorrow's courtroom advocacy," in his framing, is therefore a training problem as much as a judicial one: a lawyer who arrives armed with genuinely new research and analysis gives a judge a reason to engage freshly with a question rather than defaulting to 1980s precedent.

That argument fed directly into a related debate Rahman has watched play out inside national law schools for years: whether geographic or domicile-based admission quotas dilute or strengthen an institution's ability to build a truly national bench and bar. Speaking from a student's vantage point, he said he simply wants the best teachers regardless of where they come from — but acknowledged that geography shapes faculty recruitment in ways it does not shape student admissions, since students migrating for a five-year professional degree are pursuing knowledge almost by definition, while faculty are also choosing a place to build a stable family life, a factor institutions cannot simply wish away. He pointed out that an anthropological study of the Supreme Court's own bench would find judges who trained locally under regional teachers before returning to Delhi in "a new avatar," alongside those funnelled through a small number of national universities — evidence, in his view, that the legal profession has always functioned as something of a federal meeting point, one the Constitution itself contemplates by leaving higher education substantially to the states, subject to baseline standards.

Aalim, and the students who don't apply

That concern for representation was not only theoretical. Rahman described co-founding an informal, three-person effort called Aalim — Access to Legal Education for Muslims — after conversations with the late Professor Shamnath Basheer, who ran the diversity-focused IDIA programme (Increasing Diversity by Increasing Access). Basheer's team had succeeded in bringing students from various castes and regions into national law schools, he told Rahman, but had noticed Muslim students simply weren't coming forward, and wanted to understand why a community of India's size was effectively invisible in the applicant pool. Rahman and two colleagues began visiting schools, talking to students directly about why they weren't considering law — an exercise he says surfaced answers interesting enough to deserve their own separate conversation — and worked to identify eleven- and twelfth-graders willing to prepare for the national law entrance exam, connecting a handful of them to IDIA's own mentorship networks organised by region so that, for instance, a student from Assam could be paired with an established Assamese lawyer. The effort never became a formal institution; Rahman's own legal practice absorbed him, and the outreach continued, in his telling, more as informal personal mentorship than as an organised programme, leaving him uncertain, by his own admission, how much headway IDIA's parallel effort has since made in recruiting more Muslim and Christian students into the profession.

A guidebook for first-generation lawyers

Much of the conversation turned to Rahman's recent book, published by Eastern Book Company, which grew out of an online training course he was invited to record years earlier by a senior colleague who had started a legal e-learning platform. Rahman was reluctant to present himself as a subject-matter expert on any one field of law, so his colleague suggested something more useful: a course built from his years shuttling between courts and tribunals in Bombay, Lucknow and Delhi, aimed squarely at the practical disorientation of a first-generation lawyer entering litigation with no chamber tradition to fall back on — what a "brief" actually is, how to organise files and orders, how cause lists work and which one to watch so a matter isn't taken up and dismissed while a young lawyer waits outside the wrong courtroom. He revised and expanded the material after fielding years of questions from his own juniors, all of them first-generation lawyers themselves, and converted it into a book during the pandemic. The manuscript needed almost no editing beyond a chapter on legal ethics and an added chapter, at the publisher's insistence, on the proper use of the Supreme Court Cases citation system — "people don't even know how to use SCC, and without it there's no survival," he said.

The book's most quietly practical chapter, he said, is the one on fee-setting, a subject he described as unusually fraught for a young advocate trying simultaneously to build a client base and pay rent. Contingency fee arrangements — where a client offers to pay only if the case succeeds — are common requests, fuelled partly by legal dramas on streaming platforms, but remain flatly impermissible under Bar Council rules, and taking such an arrangement risks giving a lawyer a direct financial stake in a case's outcome. His broader rule was that fees should be set commensurate with a lawyer's standing while remaining genuinely open to reduced or waived fees for clients in real distress — someone facing a demolition, or a family in acute crisis — without ever letting a client's desperation become leverage. He also argued that fee negotiations are best handled through a chamber's administrative staff rather than the arguing lawyer directly, so that a lawyer's own financial interest never visibly colours the advocacy itself: "you are here to earn money, not to make money" — a distinction he said should discipline every fee conversation a lawyer has.

Assam as a laboratory

The conversation's most consequential turn was toward Rahman's direct experience with Foreigners Tribunals in Assam, the quasi-judicial bodies that adjudicate contested citizenship claims arising from the state's National Register of Citizens process. Rahman drew a sharp comparison between the legal protections now being extended in Bihar's ongoing Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls — where the Supreme Court has directed that legal aid be provided to every person doubted or excluded from the voter list, with appeals heard by retired High Court judges — and what he called the total absence of equivalent safeguards for Assam's D-voters (people arbitrarily marked "doubtful" as far back as 1997, disproportionately women), whose citizenship claims are instead adjudicated by Foreigners Tribunal members who, in his account, need not even meet the qualifications required of a district judge, are hired on renewable three-year contracts, and have in documented cases been terminated after ruling in ways the state disfavoured.

"Assam was a laboratory," Rahman said, "and right now the entire country is being Assamified" — a process he traces through West Bengal's own SIR exercise and the same mechanics now surfacing in Bihar. His constitutional objection was precise: Indians in Assam, Bihar and West Bengal are equally citizens operating under the same equal-protection guarantee, yet the tribunal apparatus available to a doubted voter differs by state for no principled reason tied to the underlying citizenship law, which is a central, national piece of legislation. He located the origin of Assam's weaker Foreigners Tribunal regime in the 1983 Illegal Migrants (Determination by Tribunals) Act, struck down by the Supreme Court decades ago for extending, in the court's reasoning, too much procedural protection to people alleged to be foreigners — a ruling Rahman argued ignored that most of the affected population were not educated arrivals at an international airport but families repeatedly displaced by the Brahmaputra's shifting course over generations, asked to produce documentation despite decades of natural upheaval and administrative inconsistency. In his assessment, the Foreigners Tribunal system as currently constituted does not meet the basic rule-of-law guarantee the Constitution promises every citizen — a gap he believes the rest of the country is now at risk of importing, one SIR exercise at a time.