4 min readNew DelhiMay 22, 2026 12:53 AM IST
Sisterhood in the legal profession is very important as a conscious intellectual and professional commitment to ensuring that access does not end with individual achievement, Supreme Court judge Justice BV Nagarathna said on Thursday.
She was speaking at the launch event of senior advocate Indira Jaising’s book “The Constitution Is My Home: Conversations on a Life in Law” at the India International Centre in New Delhi.
Tracing the generational arc of women in law, Justice Nagarathna, who delivered the keynote, said each generation had been made to prove something the one before it could not take for granted. “With each successive generation, the burden becomes a little less,” she said, adding, “but each generation carries forward not only its own ambition but also the accumulated courage of the women who came before them.”
On solidarity within the profession, Justice Nagarathna said that men in law had long benefited from networks of familiarity and recommendation. Women had entered without those networks, which made sisterhood not sentiment but necessity, she pointed out.
“Sisterhood in the profession is very important,” she said, adding, “as a conscious intellectual and professional commitment to ensuring that access does not end with individual achievement.”
Jaising, in conversation with journalist Sreenivasan Jain, said the Constitution had given her a sense of belonging that geography never could. On gender justice, she said the record of the courts remained deeply uneven. “Women are more honoured by our courts in their deaths,” she said, pointing out that a woman approaching the court for protection is often labelled as misusing the law.
The book, in conversation with Ritu Menon and published by HarperCollins India, traces Jaising’s six decades in law.
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On the state of constitutional democracy, she said that all governments had, at various points, tried to shake the foundations of the Constitution. But what’s different about the present, she said, is that the transformation is taking place without amending the written text. “During the emergency, it was the Constitution itself that was used to oppress the general public… It’s much easier to find a written text, a written document to challenge it. What’s happening now is without changing the written text, every other form of transformation is happening… and which is why it is so much more difficult to deal with,” she said.
On judicial deference to the executive, she said she found it logically inexplicable given that judges had security of tenure and were, in her words, more powerful than any politician could ever be.
She pointed to recent developments, including the SC revisiting its own position in the Umar Khalid UAPA bail matter, as signs of course correction from within the institution itself. The problem, she said, was that benches had not been following a three-judge SC judgment, authored by the current CJI, holding that prolonged detention without a fair trial was impermissible.
She rejected the framing of her work as dissent altogether. “It is the ruling parties which are dissenting from the Constitution of India, not us. We are claiming the right to affirm the Constitution of India,” she added.
Jaising called for a stronger, organised bar as the primary check on judicial conduct and for transparency in collegium proceedings. With the Supreme Court set to expand, she said that the three sitting women Chief Justices of High Courts should be elevated.
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CJI Surya Kant, who was unable to attend the book launch, had his address read out. “A home survives not because its walls remain untouched, it survives because each generation cares enough to preserve what is essential while adapting what is necessary,” it read.
