The Hindu undivided family called judiciary

Nobody knows when the tradition of judges addressing each other as ‘brother judges’ came into being. Going a step ahead from this relationship of siblings, a judge of the Madras High Court gave the whole line of the link, comparing the judiciary with a Hindu undivided family in which Supreme Court is the patriarch, High Courts are the eldest brothers and the courts subordinate to them are the younger siblings.

The observation made by the bench led by Justice PN Prakash came when it was dealing with a contempt petition relating to a litigant abusing a trial court judge. Sentencing the contemnor to three months in prison, the judge said that a clear message should go to one and all that the eldest brother would brook no such vituperative insult to the younger siblings, and that the High Court would feel the pain of the hurt suffered by them.

Justice Prakash also noted in his order that once the emotion of ‘fear’ afflicts a judicial officer, he would not be able to discharge the onerous responsibility of administering justice. Honour, he pointed out, was the bedrock of human life; if that was unjustly annihilated, what remains was only a living corpse, he added.

But as irony would have it, the court also had to deal with another such incident wherein it was a couple of advocates who took to social media to abuse a judge – akin to a fight within the family going by the judge’s definition. The Bar Council of Tamil Nadu and Pondicherry had no choice but to debar both the advocates.

—D Sivarajan, Chennai