The phrase used in the heading comes from an old English nursery rhyme – “Rub-a-dub-dub.” But the same phrase was immortalised in Indian constitutional jurisprudence when the Supreme Court of India, speaking through Justice Vivian Bose, invoked it while considering the Constitution and contemplating for whom it actually exists.
This simple expression in the judgment beautifully reminds us that the law is entirely intended for the ordinary citizen—the person neither learned in law nor concerned with its technicalities, but whose life is nevertheless ordered, protected, and occasionally disrupted by it.
After all, law was never meant to belong exclusively to those who practice it. Long before it becomes a statute, a precedent, or a proposition advanced across the Bar and laid down by the Bench, law represents something more fundamental: an agreement amongst people about the terms upon which they will live together.
At its heart lies a compact: we agree to be governed by certain rules; to surrender certain freedoms in return for others; to confer power upon institutions and, equally, to place limits upon that power. We create governments, legislatures, and courts to administer this arrangement, but the arrangement itself remains of the People.
The Constitution makes this particularly difficult to forget. Its first words do not invoke the Parliament, the government or Court. They invoke “We, the People.”
Yet, the language of law, in statutes, and judgments, can sometimes create precisely the opposite impression.
It is practised in courtrooms, recorded in law reports, debated in journals and expressed through a vocabulary that can seem deliberately inaccessible to those outside the profession. The result is an unfortunate distance that is created between the law and those in whose name it ultimately operates.
But the law does not truly live in the pages upon which it is printed. It lives in the consequences that follow.
If law is a compact amongst people, then its guardians cannot only be judges and lawyers. They must also be the people who live under it and benefit from it.
But that guardianship requires more than knowledge that a law exists; it requires conversation. Not necessarily agreement. Indeed, disagreement is intrinsic to the development of law. Some of our most enduring legal principles began as arguments against what was then accepted to be trite. But importantly, this conversation should not remain confined to those already inside the courtroom.
W/O PREJUDICE begins with that modest proposition. It is intended as a place to examine law not merely as doctrine, but as something lived. The object is not to provide answers to every question, nor to pretend that the law always provides one. It is to engage with the law, to examine it where possible, and to try to comprehend the manner in which it engages with us.
Above all, it must be understood in the manner in which it is ultimately experienced: as part of ordinary life—for the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker. For we, the people.
May it please the Court.
W/o Prejudice 