1st December 1998 the first class on the first day of the first batch at NALSAR the poser was have you heard of Prof. Upendra Baxi? Since then three years of reading him did not prepare us for the intensive week of close encounter with Prof. Baxi in flesh and blood. As he prowled the Nalsar campus in early July and made himself completely at home as though to the manor born, we wee all turned out of the safe haven of our assumptions and conclusions.

His first lecture was on C. 1, C. 2, C. 3-Constitution, Constitutional Law and constitutionalism. He differentiated between the three and stated that the Constitution was a text a certain arrangement of words on paper. Constitutional Law was the interpretation of this text by various groups of people. Further it was the interpretation given to this text by citizens that create Constitutional Law. Constitutionalism was clearly a philosophy of what the Constitution ought to be vis-à-vis what it was (i.e.) a governance text in conflict with Art 3 which formed the rights and Justice text. According to him the Indian Constitution was a combination of Liberal, Democratic and socialist constitutionalism embodied in the fundamental duties. The Indian Constitution exemplified a novel rights theory as rights were construed as a restraint on the civil society whereas the Western Constitutions saw them as limitations on the power of governance. The three Cs arrested social intellect and were necessary in the choices that were exercised. Even though all of us had read about social action litigation his lecture was enlightening as it elaborated on the process and legal reasoning that went behind it, which could not be found in any documentation. Differentiating between public interest as against social interest due to its consideration of the three Ds (i.e.) disadvantaged, dispossessed, deprived persons, he helped us understand the politics of meaning and that, labels can be borrowed but not histories. In India social action litigation covered a variety of rights as different as the right to speedy trial and the rights to employment and shelter whereas in American PILs were confined to issues of public participation with regard to statutory decisions. Further he differentiated between active and activist judge. (what he calls Upenism) Though every judge had to be active to the extent of delivering judgments, an activist judge was one who views himself as a friend, servant, trustee accountable to the people and rather than as a representative of the state. He revealed an unusual exemplification of the backstage dynamics in how the doctrine of locus standi was widened not in any poor persons case but the Second judges transfer case. SAL had often been criticized as an attempt by the judiciary to usurp legislative powers. His response was that every interpretation created new law and one cannot apply law without creating it. He believed that the Indian Supreme Court was losing the character of this state with the SAL such that the judicial process had itself become a social movement. This rendered Dicey a theory of seperation of powers obsolete. Thus we were fascinated by the novel ways by which he countered arguments and by the manner in which the took his propositions to their logical conclusion.

On 13 July he discussed the application of wisdom to practical situations or jurisprudence. According to him it was a method subversive of all uncertainities-a constant interrogation of the law and society. It aided the exploration of possibilities of the exclusionary impact of language and the study of evolution of the same law would also reveal how the previously excluded comeback. Moving away from the traditional approach to the subject by way of the various schools of jurisprudence he classified the subject into a history of ideas, tool for law and policy, basis of evaluation, movement for social transformation. The history of ideas must be critically examined after contextualising it to recognize whose history constituted jurisprudence. He gave a novel interpretation to the fundamental duties which stated that every citizen had the duty to develop scientific temper, be politically informed. He saw it as an attempt to bring about reform as the duty of all citizens to evaluate the law by the application of jurisprudence. The impact was apparent in the fact that we no longer viewed jurisprudence as a theoretical abstract framework but as the practical litmus test that laws must pass.

Whose law? Who s Justice? Jurisprudence of Poes garden was a lecture that a large number of us looked forward to because of the contemporaneity. We also secretly looked forward to locking horns with him armed as we were with our opinions and also after reading of the prolific amount of ink that had been expended on it. Unfortunately and fortunately for us he refused to get into any cliched partisan position. Though we have a written constitution an unwritten one also comes into existence because despite our attempts to cover unintended consequences in reality a large number remain unanticipated. Firstly, it was the unwritten constitution as distinguished from the written that was violated in Tamil Nadu. Thus the incident was improper rather than illegal. The reasons why it created such a maelstrom were that because the law when applied was applied on the upper echelons it was considered unjust and also because local political cultures occupied the spaces left by the written constitution. The difference between the real reason and the reason attributed for the Governors recall revealed the gap between the Constitution and the manner in which it was applied. We also had a taste of the impact of the irony in Mark Antonys speech as this lecture was punctuated by they are all honourable men.

We had initially assumed that the lecture on interpretation of statutes would be a tame affair as the positions were relatively uncontroversial. We were in for a surprise. He said that, interpretation is a woman, an enachantress who leads the judge away from the sacredness of the text and marks him betray it. On a more serious note it was yet another typical-Prof. Baxi session of demolishing all previous constructs. At the outset, he refused to be limited by the word statute and dealt with interpretation of all legal materials, as statutes and cases alike created rights and liabilities. On the intention of the legislature he said that it was a myth as it was not one but a composite bundle which subsumed contradictory voice within itself.

The jurisprudence of catastrophes was remarkable lecture. According to him Law could eliminate risk but by regulating it, it could differentiate between risk and catastrophe. It was thus in this manner that Law created fate and presented risk as fate and refused to alter it. For instance the history of tort law revealed that it development corresponded with the growth of industralisation and that was the reason why tort law normalized rather than problematized risks. This is of great relevance in the modern-day context as every natural disaster had a man-made component to it as all disasters are socially managed.

He provided us an insight into the difference between legality and legitimacy. Gandhiji was an example of his differentiation. Though Gandhi did not deny the legality of British laws, by bearing the punishment he refused its legitimacy. Social acceptance cannot be the test to prove legitimacy as it is at best an indicator of majoritarian ideology. Law though an engine for radical ideas would be an empty signifier unless contextualised. The true test for determining the authority of authorities would not be in what but how everything is being defined. Legitimacy has also to be viewed in the light of accountability, responsibility, liability, immunity (suspect words). The most noteworthy feature of this lecture was that he taught us that when law chose a certain word the impact of the resulting nuances was inescapable. For example accountability was an impoverishing word as it was devoid of the nature, care required by responsibility.

The session on the 16th of July was marked by issues on violence: framing notions of violence force, terror and the law itself as a foundational, reiterative, interpretational, jurisgenerative violence. Law is the text of reasons and procedure that enables people in authority to justify violence and harm. Law in all its forms is about violence and has an inherent tendency to hurt. For example the Indian Constitution has itself sanitized violence on atleast two counts: by its complete silence over the greatest non-European Holocaust (i.e.) partition was itself an archive of barbarism and by its methods of social and political exclusion as the fact remains that the dual authors of rights are individuals and communities.

He spoke of those who defied law when morality did not allow them to obey as philosophical anarchists. A philosophical anarchist, by virtue of the burden of justification he carries with him, does not obey the law under state authority or the threat of sanction if he finds it to be immoral. Law aims to bring about order and for Prof Baxi, order is a term of power which is in contrast to conscience as it is a term of morals.

His position on administrative law was that of a philosophical anarchist (i.e.) it ought not to be rationalized but problematized. For example in the Bhopal case the requirement of hearing the victims was done away with. Post decisional hearing was justified as sufficient because to do a great right to do a little wrong is permissible and ultimately the people suffered the wrong whilst the right was done to the UCC.

Prof. Baxi is one of those rare teachers who can teach us the basic principles of the subject and mysteriously ensure that we analysed, criticized everything we read and heard. He taught us how not to read the case - not to look at what the judges said but what they did with what they said. The nicest thing (assuming that we were restricted to one choice) about his method of teaching was that he refused to give us answers. On any given topic at every point of time during the discussion he would be constantly seeking responses from us. He would virtually deconstruct every ''answer'' of ours no matter how foolproof we thought it was. To be very honest there were a lot of times that we felt as though we had been put through the wringer. We are NALSAR agree to disagree on which of his sessions we thought was the best. We are only slowly recovering from the cyclonic impact and beginning afresh. He has taught us by practice not to make compromises on the intellectual front. We are glad that we met him not only because he is such an original thinker but also because each of us carry with us our own most treasured memory of him. We don't know how he managed to actually spend quality time with all of us but manage he did and how! any individual or group of students could approach him to talk about anything under the sky - whether it as projects or an area that we were interested in . . . . The agenda was ours to fix. He was never too busy nor the time inconvenient to engage in a dialogue with us. The way he spoke with us ensuring that no query was too insignificant for him to address made us feel that that though had never before occurred to any other person. The next time he comes we must remember to ask him how he managed to fit in so many of us in 24 hour days. We're reminding him that ideas do not come singly but in pairs . . . . So when are you coming next? O.K. maybe it is a masochistic streak that makes us desirous of having yet other mental foundations pulled down . . . maybe we do not want to forget the person who lives the Ullysian ideal of ''to strive, to seek, to find and not to yield''.

So long Prof. Baxi. !