Chief Justice Surya Kant’s recent directive to India’s 2 million-strong lawyers’ community to limit the length of their oral arguments in the country’s over-burdened courts has been long overdue.

A defining feature of the legal system which deters foreign investment, draws wry smiles from domestic businessmen and terrifies lay citizens, is the law’s excruciating delay. Learned counsel, especially in the high and Supreme Courts, go on for hours reiterating facts and explaining and re-explaining points of law to indulgent judges. For litigants who pay for learned counsels’ aid and advice by the hour, it’s a mystery why points of law have to be drilled into judges who by definition are well-qualified and quick on the uptake. That’s why they are singled out from the multitude of lawyers and elevated to the bench.

Although not new to your editor, a former barrister of the Bombay high court who quit the legal profession many decades ago (too much law, too little justice), the verbosity and loquacity of the law has struck home with some force as a consequence of a duffer dressed up as educationist who filed a suit to prevent the inclusion of his school in the elaborate annual EducationWorld India School Rankings (EWISR). This suit which should be summarily dismissed on the short point that Article 19 (1) (a) confers a fundamental right of freedom of speech and expression upon all citizens, especially the press, has generated much back and forth expense and mountain of paperwork. This in a legal system equipped with only 21 judges per million population cf. America’s 107. Even communist China has a judges-population ratio of 160 per million. According to one calculation, it’ll take 324 years at the present speed of case disposal for India to clear its judicial backlog.

Doyens of bench and bar fancy themselves as intelligentsia. Time they applied themselves to clean up their mess. It’s earning them societal hatred, ridicule and contempt.