Most months, the legal system spends its energy examining everyone else. August was the month the machinery turned on itself.
Consider what happened in the space of four weeks.
The Bar Council of India, the body that controls entry into the legal profession, tried to stop an entire graduating batch of one of the country's best law schools from enrolling as advocates, because some students had protested an invitation. It reversed itself within hours, but not before every law student in the country understood what had just been attempted. By month's end, a second premier law school had cancelled its own convocation rather than hold it under the shadow of that dispute.
In the same fortnight, the Supreme Court looked at the state bar councils, the profession's own elected bodies, and called them what it saw: men's clubs. It did not stop at the observation. It ordered two women co-opted into every one of them.
And in the space of three days, two of the most closely watched sexual violence cases of the past decade produced opposite results. A trial court acquitted a powerful former sports administrator because the prosecution had not proved its case. A High Court overturned a five-year-old acquittal and convicted a once-celebrated editor, thirteen years after the incident. Together they showed the appellate system doing exactly what it exists to do: reviewing, correcting, sometimes reversing, in both directions.
Self-examination is the thing institutions do worst. It is always easier to regulate outward than inward. So a month in which the profession's regulator was challenged by twenty-two-year-olds, the courts reformed the bar's own governing bodies, and verdicts moved both ways under scrutiny, is worth marking. Not because every episode ended well. At least one, the enrolment threat, should worry anyone who cares about how power over careers is exercised.
But the alternative to a system that examines itself is a system that never does. This issue is about the difference.