Tushar Mehta’s Courtroom Chronicles May Be The Judiciary’s Most Human Portrait Yet
Having risen through decades of relentless courtroom practice to become India’s Solicitor General, Tushar Mehta has witnessed the legal profession from its rawest trenches to its highest constitutional corridors. It is perhaps this lived immersion that now allows him to humanise the courtroom with unusual authenticity
Tushar Mehta, Solicitor General of India
Few lawyers in contemporary India embody courtroom intensity and constitutional litigation quite like Mr. Tushar Mehta. For years now, the Solicitor General of India has been one of the most recognisable and formidable faces inside the Supreme Court. Sharp, disciplined and often intensely serious, Mehta has built a reputation around constitutional battles, politically sensitive litigation, and relentless courtroom advocacy. He is not somebody the public instinctively associates with nostalgia, humour, or literary reflection. He carries a public image of precision, restraint, and resolute advocacy. A man perpetually at the centre of the country’s most consequential legal contests.
Which is precisely why his decision to write The Lawful and the Awful and The Bench, the Bar and the Bizarre feels so unexpectedly fascinating, as these books appear to do something very few people within the legal establishment attempt. They humanise the courtroom.
Not through grand constitutional theorising. Not through abstract jurisprudence. But through stories. Strange and funny stories. Stories of wit, eccentricity, dissent, theatre, vanity and unpredictability that quietly exist beneath the intimidating architecture of the law.
And perhaps nobody is better placed to tell them. There is no doubt that the legal profession often projects itself as solemn and inaccessible. To the average person across the globe, courts appear distant and ceremonial. Black coats. Endless procedure. Hierarchy. Constitutional jargon. What the public rarely sees is that courtrooms are also deeply human spaces full of personality, awkwardness, insecurity, humour and occasionally outright absurdity. That appears to be the world Mehta is opening up for readers.
From unusual and fascinating beginnings of judgments to judges writing in wildly unconventional styles, from legendary British courtroom wit and humour to sharply worded dissents delivered in caustic language, the books appear set to traverse a side of legal culture that is almost never discussed publicly. There are references to bizarre courtroom behaviour, unconventional judicial conduct, and the strange theatre that has historically surrounded the legal profession across jurisdictions.
From a legal journalist’s perspective, the book consciously positions itself less as a reflection on judicial culture, courtroom behaviour and the deeply human world surrounding the law.
Those who have closely observed Delhi’s legal ecosystem would agree that the books’ author is not somebody looking at the profession from outside. This is the Solicitor General of India himself. One of the most powerful legal voices in the country. A man who has spent decades inside courtrooms across Gujarat, Delhi and the Supreme Court, watching the legal system not merely as doctrine and precedent, but as human behaviour unfolding in real time.That perspective carries unusual authority.
Mehta’s own professional journey explains why these observations feel authentic rather than performative. He enrolled as an advocate with the Bar Council of Gujarat in 1987 and began practice under senior advocate Krishnakant Vakharia at the Gujarat High Court. He later became Additional Advocate General for Gujarat, then Additional Solicitor General of India in 2014, before being appointed Solicitor General in 2018. He was designated Senior Advocate by the Gujarat High Court in 2008 at the age of 42 and had earned five gold medals during his legal education at Gujarat University.
That trajectory matters because these books seem to emerge from immersion rather than observation. Mehta has seen the profession from every angle. Trial courts. Constitutional courts. Political litigation. Judicial temperament. The culture of the Bar. The mythology surrounding judges and courtrooms. The insecurities and egos institutions quietly carry beneath their formal structures.
And that is what makes this literary turn so compelling.
At a time when public conversations around courts are increasingly reduced to outrage cycles, ideology and political binaries, these books seem to offer something different. Perspective. Texture. Humour. Humanity. There is also something quietly reassuring about seeing a figure as institutionally powerful as the Solicitor General acknowledge that the law is not merely about power and precedent. It is also about people. About behaviour. About wit surviving inside one of the world’s most serious professions.
Mehta stands at the very centre of India’s legal establishment and yet appears willing to pull back the curtain just enough for readers to see the profession in all its strange humanity. That is why people are paying attention. And they should.