Sanya Talwar

Dude whined so much about the cab rank rule that he completely missed the exceptions to it. One would expect a person writing an entire article on a rule to at least read the rule first. Lawyers often refuse cases because they don't like the fee. Lack of a proper fee has long been a basis for counsel to refuse a brief, and Rule 11 of the BCI Rules itself covers that justification. A lawyer worth his salt cannot be expected to starve and live like a low-life communist in a crumpled gown taken out of a trash bin. A lawyer must know how to value his time and get properly paid for it. After all, working pro bono is a choice, not a life sentence. And fee is one thing, morality is quite another. Personal moral disapproval of the client or the cause is not a ground to refuse a brief, at least where a cab rank rule is in place. A lawyer is not the judge of the cause, and the moment he starts picking clients based on his own view of morality, he stops being a counsel and becomes a moral gatekeeper deciding who deserves a defence. Everyone is entitled to representation, even the people you love to hate. If we followed his logic, Erskine should never have defended Paine and Adams should have left the British soldiers to the mob. If one has to look in India, we saw how Rajeev Dhavan was abused and threatened for arguing the Muslim side in Ayodhya, and K. Parasaran got his fair share from the other camp. By his logic, both legends of the bar should have returned their briefs and left the Supreme Court to hear a title suit with nobody/someone completely useless arguing it. And that is precisely the part that bothers him. The lawyer regarding whom the entire controversy has erupted here is appearing for an organisation someone has branded as TERF. Whether one agrees with that organisation or not is irrelevant. It is entitled to representation like anyone else, as legal representation does not come with an ideological purity test. So, his entire rant stems from his dislike of people who stand on the opposite side of the causes he supports, and in his view lawyers who act for them cannot escape social opprobrium. Apparently the right to counsel is fine as long as counsel agrees with him. Funnily enough, he takes no issue if some fool turned up to defend the side he dislikes. The outrage begins only when that side hires someone who can actually win. He dresses this up as if his view has some great moral upside. But who decides that morality? Our Road Scholar Gautam Bhatia? Since when did one man’s reading list become a moral code of conduct for the legal profession? That doesn’t look like a legal argument, it is a whine-story with endnotes on indconlawphil. And this is the funniest part of his two cents: with no answer to the cab rank rule, he attacks the rule itself, which is his go-to fallback whenever he doesn’t like something. Don’t like a constitutional provision? Repeal it. Don’t like a statute? Pass it off as a colonial relic. Don’t like the rule? Write an article and call it reform. Give him a few more articles to write and the cab rank rule will become a guest list, where he is standing at the door deciding who gets in and who doesn’t.