[Ritu Menon:] Your taking up matters of workers’ rights – trade unionists, air hostesses, even pavement dwellers – was this an accident or a conscious choice? [Indira Jaising:] I think it had a great deal to do with the fact that I was a woman and a first-generation lawyer. I had no role models to follow. There was no template for the kind of work I wanted to do. In many ways, that was my greatest advantage. I had the freedom to shape my identity, my practice and my choices entirely on my own terms.When I began practising, there were no collectives of lawyers working on social and economic rights. There were no NGOs in the sense we know them today, and no meaningful system of legal aid. The legal profession was dominated by traditional, family-run firms focused almost entirely on commercial law. There were individual lawyers who took up public-interest work, but there was no institutional support for the marginalised. The Lawyers’ Collective emerged from the need to collectivise legal services in the public interest and make them accessible to those who needed them most.The generation of lawyers before me was largely preoccupied with the right to property. At that time, it was still a fundamental right, though it was later removed and reintroduced as Article 300A in 1978. Much of the litigation focused on challenging land reform laws and legislation affecting business and industry. This is evident from the reported judgments of the period. What is striking is that there was not a single reported judgment dealing meaningfully with the rights of marginalised communities, and virtually none addressing women’s rights.Ironically, many litigants in these cases were women. But when a land reform law was challenged in a woman’s name, I often found that she was merely a proxy for her family. The litigation had little to do with her rights and everything to do with protecting family property for male heirs. In those years, women’s property rights were usually asserted only after their deaths, when heirs claimed inheritance from a mother who had inherited as a widow. Most such cases were initiated by upper-caste men. Even when women approached courts on their own, they were typically upper-caste women, sometimes challenging reservations for Dalits in public employment.There were, of course, left-wing lawyers working on civil and political rights. A formative example was the challenge to the preventive detention of comrade AK Gopalan, a prominent Communist leader who had been incarcerated without trial and later detained under the Preventive Detention Act of 1950. In AK Gopalan vs State of Madras, the petition questioned the legality of his continued detention. The case was argued by the Madras-based firm VG Rao and Company, known for its trade union work and civil rights advocacy. There has long been a tradition of left-wing activism around civil liberties: Lawyers such as KG Kannabiran, for example, exposed legal impunity and so-called encounter deaths during the Emergency and successfully challenged unlawful detention as well as loss of life and liberty. Their work set important precedents for civil rights litigation. Yet, social and economic rights – housing, work, dignity, livelihood – remained largely outside the legal imagination.This was the environment in which I set up my practice. I had no chamber to join, no senior to rely on and no established network to fall back on. I found that freedom liberating. I began with a clean slate and could decide for myself what kind of lawyer I wished to be. I chose to focus on the concerns of working women because I instinctively identified with them. Even so, this kind of litigation carried its own burden of pain, and some of it even entered my own life. In the mid-1970s, I represented an Air India air hostess who had challenged her dismissal. While her case was still pending, she died by suicide. No one can say with certainty what drove her to it. But the fact that she did not see justice in her lifetime left a lasting grief in me. It was then I realised, in a visceral way, how brutal litigation can be for ordinary people – first, in the injustice they suffer, and then in the delays, expense, absence of effective legal aid and the courts’ reluctance to confront State power and corruption.Around the same time, I began to notice a quiet deference among judges to executive authority. There was a growing belief that the government knows best what serves the nation and, therefore, ought not to be questioned. Such deference effectively amounts to an abdication of judicial responsibility and reflects a failure to enforce the Constitution. Regrettably, this tendency remains deeply embedded in Indian judicial thinking…We are taught, as lawyers, not to take our cases personally. We are told to maintain distance, to be objective. But, in practice, that barrier often collapses. One begins to suffer with one’s clients, caught alongside them in a system that drains them. Many lawyers insist such identification is unwise. Seniors and peers advise keeping a safe distance. We are expected to accept that we cannot choose our cases selectively and must learn to be “objective” about our work.This position is justified by invoking the “cab rank rule”, the notion that a lawyer must take the next client who approaches, just as a taxi must take the next passenger. It is defended in the name of access to justice. But that is not the same as saying everyone is entitled to our particular service. In reality, it can become a self-serving rule, serving as a convenient cover for commercial practice.I wanted the freedom to choose. I remember arguing on behalf of pavement dwellers that, when faced with the choice between homelessness and living on the pavements of Bombay, they had a right to reside there. It was a bold claim, born out of the legal doctrine of necessity…[Ritu Menon:] You have often spoken about what you call “democratic lawyering”. Could you elaborate? [Indira Jaising:] Your question goes to the heart of how we understand the legitimate role of the judiciary in a democracy. As an institution, the judiciary emerged with the rise of liberalism in common-law countries and came to India through colonial rule. The idea of the rule of law has a 4,000-year history and is now accepted as the foundation of democratic governance.In India, there was no concept of an independent judiciary in the modern sense before the Lockean idea of the social contract – a concept associated with the 17th-century English philosopher John Locke that recognises individuals as rights-bearing citizens and limits the role of the state – became widely accepted. Earlier, justice was dispensed by kings or, in certain contexts, by religious authorities. Over time, courts evolved into institutions empowered to adjudicate a wide range of disputes. Judges came to bear the responsibility of balancing individual rights against executive power. Gradually, the courtroom began to reflect the aspirations of the people and their claims upon the State – social, economic and political.The law compels individuals to take responsibility for their actions. At the same time, it obliges the State to respect the rights of citizens. Traditionally, the Left viewed law primarily as an instrument of oppression, used to discipline and control the working classes. At best, they approached courts defensively, to protect their civil and political rights and for freedom from incarceration. They did not, historically, see courts as spaces for laying down normative frameworks for social and economic rights. Litigation was not used as a tool for democratic norm-setting in these areas. There was only one important exception: the economic rights of the organised working class, particularly the right of proletarians to fair wages. This was in part because the Trade Unions Act of 1926 had already conferred legal recognition on trade unions, enabling them to register formally and represent workers in collective bargaining. The All India Trade Union Congress (AITUC), established in 1920 as one of the country’s earliest national trade union federations, provided an organisational platform for labour activism. After Independence, most political parties developed affiliated trade unions of their own. These unions, in turn, had their own network of specialised labour lawyers. In that sense, the organised working class was relatively well represented in the courts. Yet these trade union lawyers rarely ventured into other areas of social justice. More broadly, left-wing lawyers tended to use the Constitution as a shield rather than a sword. They relied on it to defend rights, not to expand them.Lawyers such as RK Garg and MK Ramamurthy regularly represented working-class interests before the Supreme Court. They were deeply committed constitutionalists, active in the defence of civil and political freedoms. But even they did not decisively enter the terrain of social and economic rights as a field for judicial norm-setting. Nor did they see courts as a legitimate forum for democratic discourse. It is in that gap between constitutional promise and lived reality that democratic lawyering, as I understand it, begins.Here I parted company with the generation before me, who, often out of historical and political necessity, restricted their courtroom work to defending civil and political rights rather than advancing economic and social ones.Excerpted with permission from The Constitution Is My Home: Conversations on a Life in Law, Indira Jaising with Ritu Menon, HarperCollins India.