There is something I have noticed over the years, both as a lawyer and while reporting on law. We like knowing where people stand.

It makes things easier. Once you know that someone is broadly on the Left or the Right, liberal or conservative, you think you have a fairly good idea of what they will say about free speech, religious freedom, reservations, gender, the judiciary, constitutional morality and practically everything else. Except, very often, you don’t.

For example, a judge whose reasoning you strongly disagreed with yesterday may write something tomorrow that you find difficult to fault. A lawyer whose worldview seems miles away from yours may make an argument you find yourself agreeing with. Two people who are supposed to disagree about everything may discover that they actually agree on the question in front of them, though perhaps for entirely different reasons.

The Constitution makes this even more interesting. Almost every difficult constitutional question eventually becomes a contest between things that are, on their own, perfectly defensible.

Liberty. Equality. Faith. Reform. Autonomy. Institutional restraint. Democratic will. Minority rights. Constitutional morality.

Obviously, the difficulty begins when two of them arrive in the same case.

And perhaps that is why, the longer I spend around the law, the less interested I am in asking whether an interpretation is “Left” or “Right” and the more interested I am in asking how somebody got there.

This became particularly apparent to me during a conversation we recorded recently for LawBeat.

We put Senior Advococates Gopal Sankaranarayanan and J. Sai Deepak across the table to discuss the Constitution.

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The premise, at least on paper, appeared to promise a fairly clear contest between two very different constitutional worldviews. I had propositions. I had questions. I had anticipated where some of the disagreements might lie.

The conversation, rather inconsiderately, developed a mind of its own. We began with whether the Constitution should be understood as transformative or evolving. That immediately raised another question: if something evolves, is that itself a form of transformation?

From there came the basic structure, reservations, Sabarimala, constitutional morality, judicial appointments, representation and eventually feminism.

There were places where Gopal and Sai disagreed quite sharply. There were places where they appeared to begin from opposite ends and somehow landed surprisingly close to each other. There were propositions on which one might have expected disagreement and found very little of it.

It was also fun. There were raised eyebrows, interruptions, questions thrown back across the table, moments of exasperation and several moments when everyone laughed.

None of this made the disagreement any less serious. If anything, it made it easier to understand.

And somewhere during those ninety minutes, the conversation itself began to make a larger point than any of the propositions we had written down before recording it.

People are more complicated than their perceived politics. So are constitutional arguments.

This seems obvious when written down. In practice, we increasingly behave as though it isn’t. We often encounter an argument today along with a ready-made biography of the person making it. Before deciding what we think about the proposition, we already know what the person supposedly represents. Sometimes we know which “side” is expected to applaud and which side is expected to be outraged.

Social media has obviously made this worse, but the legal profession is hardly innocent.

We have our own camps, our own labels and our own assumptions about judges, lawyers and judgments. Sometimes even a constitutional argument gets treated almost like a football club. Once you have picked your team, changing sides on a particular question can look suspicious.

But constitutional law has never really worked like that. Take almost any question that has divided courts over the years. Judges sitting on the same Bench, looking at the same text and the same precedents, have reached completely different conclusions. Majorities have become minorities. Dissents have become doctrine. Ideas once considered radical have become ordinary, and occasionally the reverse.

That history should at least make us slightly less certain that every constitutional question can be sorted immediately into the correct ideological drawer.

Perhaps this is what I wish I had understood earlier as a law student myself. You don’t have to choose a worldview and then spend the rest of your legal life defending everything that comes packaged with it. You can agree with someone today and disagree with them tomorrow. You can think a judgment reached the correct conclusion for completely different reasons from those given by the court.

You can hear an argument from someone whose politics you dislike and still admit that the argument has merit.

And sometimes, after listening patiently for twenty minutes, you can conclude that you were absolutely right to disagree in the first place.

That too is useful. Which is why, when we were deciding when to release this conversation, Independence Day somehow felt appropriate.

Not because the debate produced some grand conclusion about what the Constitution means. It didn’t.

Two people carrying different histories, instincts and ideas of the Constitution sat together and tried to explain how they saw it. Sometimes they met. Sometimes they didn’t. Nobody needed to pretend otherwise.

Perhaps there is something worth preserving in that. We speak a great deal about the freedom to speak. The freedom to hear, to question, to reconsider and occasionally to be surprised by the person sitting on the other side of the table gets considerably less attention.

For anyone beginning a life in law, I think that freedom is worth holding on to. Because once we know exactly what everybody thinks before they have even spoken, there isn’t much left to talk about.

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