Khorakiwala on Judicial Iconography and Access to Justice in the Bombay High Court

Rahela Khorakiwala, Max Planck Society for the Advancement of the Sciences/Max Planck Institute for European Legal History; Jawaharlal Nehru University, has published Judicial Iconography and Access to Justice in the Bombay High Court at 7 Südasien-Chronik/South Asia Chronicle 351 (2017)

In this paper I argue that certain aspects of the judicial iconography of the Bombay High Court and its practices hinder access to justice. The idea of access to justice that I refer to, is the physical accessibility of the court building which is read through Franz Kafka’s parable on Before the Law. Further, the article focuses on the public interest litigation that has been filed in the Bombay High Court for the creation of a new high court building. Based on my ethnographic study, I look at the restrictions through the visual in the form of the dress worn by judges and lawyers and the ban on photography in court premises. In conclusion, I discuss the idea of law as heritage and how the Bombay High Court deals with its iconography in relation to its heritage and eventually, how this affects the process of access to justice.

. The full text is not available from SSRN.