Comment in 150 words: Indian Constitution is a ‘Lawyers’ Paradise’. – Ivor Jennings. (2018, 10 Marks)
The phrase belongs to Sir Ivor Jennings, the British constitutional scholar, whose Madras lectures of 1952, published as Some Characteristics of the Indian Constitution (1953), judged the new document “too long, too rigid, too prolix”. A text so detailed and qualified, he suggested, would serve lawyers better than citizens.
The strength of the charge
- Legalistic drafting: terms such as “reasonable restrictions”, “public order” and “procedure established by law” acquire meaning only through litigation, and every freedom in Article 19 carries grounds of restriction that courts must construe.
- Length and borrowing: 395 articles and 8 schedules in 1950, now about 470 articles in 25 parts with 12 schedules, drawn from the Government of India Act 1935 and several foreign models.
- Who wrote it: advocates formed the largest occupational group in the Constituent Assembly, and leading figures — Jawaharlal Nehru, Vallabhbhai Patel, B. R. Ambedkar, Rajendra Prasad — were trained lawyers.
- Shifting interpretation: the Preamble was held not to be part of the Constitution in Berubari (1960) and to be part of it in Kesavananda Bharati (1973). Parliamentary privileges under Article 105 remain uncodified.
- Cost: in a system of expensive and slow litigation, a rights charter needing interpretation is most available to those who can hire counsel.
The answer
- Detail replaced absent conventions. Introducing the draft on 4 November 1948, Ambedkar defended writing the form of administration into the text, since constitutional morality is not a natural sentiment and has to be cultivated. Britain can be brief because practice fills its silences; India could not assume such habits.
- Litigation is how rights work. Recourse to Articles 32 and 226 signals access, not defect, and public interest litigation relaxed standing so that the poor need not hire lawyers.
- Courts have clarified rather than confused: Maneka Gandhi (1978) read fairness into Article 21, and S. R. Bommai (1994) made misuse of Article 356 harder.
- Deliberate openness: some provisions were left general so later generations could settle them. 106 amendments show a blend of rigidity and flexibility that Jennings’s prediction missed.
- Granville Austin, in Working a Democratic Constitution (1999), saw national unity, democracy and social revolution woven into a “seamless web” — detail served a transformative purpose, not lawyerly pedantry.
Conclusion
Jennings described the text accurately and misjudged its consequences. The Constitution is a lawyers’ document, but seventy-five years of use have made it a citizens’ instrument: the detail he condemned let it absorb social change without replacement. His charge survives as a critique of access to justice, not of the Constitution’s design.