Law & Justice's Off the Bench by Justice V. R. Krishna Iyer – Reprint 2024

Law & Justice Publishing Co. brings out the 2024 reprint of Off the Bench by Justice V. R. Krishna Iyer — a 528-page paperback collecting the writing of the judge who did more than any other to turn the Supreme Court of India towards the poor.

The title says what the book is. These are the reflections of a judge writing off the bench, freed from the discipline of the judgment: on law and lawyers, on the courts and their failures, on justice as something owed to people rather than administered to them. The cover carries his own statement of the creed:

"Law is not a trade, not briefs, not merchandise, and so the heaven of commercial competition should not vulgarize the legal profession. Litigants are legal patients suffering from injustices seeking healing for their wounds."

Why Krishna Iyer still matters

Justice V. R. Krishna Iyer (1915–2014) sat on the Supreme Court of India from 1973 to 1980, and in those seven years helped remake Indian constitutional law. He was central to the birth of public interest litigation and the relaxation of locus standi, to the expansion of Article 21 beyond a narrow procedural reading, to the jurisprudence of bail ("bail, not jail"), of prisoners' rights, and of legal aid as a constitutional entitlement rather than charity.

His prose is unmistakable — dense, allusive, morally insistent, and unlike any other Indian judicial writing. For a reader who knows him only through the law reports, this collection is where the thinking behind the judgments is set out plainly.

What the book offers

• Essays and reflections on the legal profession — its ethics, its commercialisation, and what an advocate owes a litigant.
• On the judiciary — judicial accountability, appointments, arrears and the reform of the courts.
• On access to justice — legal aid, public interest litigation and the place of the poor in a court system built for the propertied.
• On human rights, prison reform and social justice, the themes that run through his judgments.
• Written for the general reader as much as the lawyer — legal literature rather than a treatise.

Who should buy this book

• Advocates and judges, for whom this is part of the professional inheritance.
• Law students and judicial service aspirants — essential background to the PIL and Article 21 jurisprudence they study as doctrine.
• Academics and researchers in constitutional law, legal history and law and society.
• Anyone interested in the Indian judiciary and in justice as a public question — the book does not require legal training.
• Law libraries and a natural gift for a young lawyer at enrolment.

Law & Justice Publishing Co. also reprints several other Krishna Iyer titles, including From the Bench to the Bar, Judge's Potpourri, Random Reflections, Legal Spectrum, Law & Life, Dynamic Lawyering and The Majesty of the Judiciary.