Between the Bar and the Bench: A Supreme Court Lawyer's Reckoning With the Law

A Small-Town Beginning

Talha Abdul Rahman grew up in Faizabad, the town twinned with Ayodhya in eastern Uttar Pradesh, at a time when law was not yet the aspirational career it has since become. He describes the Faizabad of his schooldays as a tightly knit place, where neighbours moved freely in and out of each other's homes, even as outsiders reduced the town to headlines about the adjoining city. Faizabad also sat astride a route: anyone travelling from Azamgarh, Gorakhpur or Basti toward Lucknow passed through it, and watching people from that hinterland struggle to get anything done by the administration in the bigger city left an early impression on him — a society unable to access what it was entitled to.

Like many of his peers, he was steered toward an engineering track in class 11 and 12. But leadership roles at school reinforced a different instinct: he wanted to be somewhere he could meet people, see their problems and make himself useful. Announcing that he wanted to study law instead amounted to what he calls a small rebellion at home. His father, an engineer, and a family with several doctors in it, could not understand why a student doing well academically would choose law. His father eventually agreed, but on one condition: it had to be the best institution available, nothing less. Rahman sat the entrance examinations then run separately by different National Law Universities, and was admitted to NALSAR, Hyderabad.

Skepticism at home lingered for years, until an incident on a bus settled it. Rahman's father, travelling from Lucknow to Allahabad, happened to sit beside a judge, who asked what his children did. Told that the youngest was studying law at NALSAR, the judge was visibly impressed — external validation, in Rahman's telling, that his father had needed to be convinced his son had made a sound choice.

The Family's Lawyer, Before He Was One

Rahman's connection to litigation began well before law school. When he was seven, his father's small factory in Faizabad ran into labour trouble — a worker was terminated, others struck in solidarity, and conciliation proceedings followed. By his third year at NALSAR, the same kind of problem started arriving in the post: his father would send him the facts of a live dispute and ask him to research and advise, and Rahman would work through the law, photocopy relevant material, and mail back a covering note with instructions for the family's local lawyers. Labour disputes were followed by income tax and VAT matters — every factory owner, he says, has some problem or other running.

The effect was to make him study labour law, taxation and civil procedure with an intensity that had nothing to do with examinations. He won a gold medal in labour law, and by 23 or 24 had been empanelled as standing counsel for the income tax department — a role he attributes to having already worked through chartered-accountancy texts as an undergraduate simply to make sense of his father's tax troubles. Looking back, he frames it as a kind of providence: had he studied engineering, he would have been of no use to his father; because he studied law, he could actually help.

What Oxford Teaches That NALSAR Didn't

Rahman began preparing for a master's abroad within months of entering NALSAR, reasoning that the competitiveness of foreign admissions made it unwise to wait until the final years of law school. Part of the motivation, he says, came from noticing that many leading lawyers of India's freedom struggle and the Constituent Assembly debates had themselves studied abroad, and he wanted to understand what that exposure had given them. From the second semester onward he built a case for himself through publications and articles, sharpening his ability to frame an argument and situate a position within existing scholarship — enough, by his final year, to secure both admission and a scholarship to Oxford, ahead of offers from other universities.

Asked to pin down the real difference between legal education in India and at Oxford, beyond infrastructure and institutional history, Rahman locates it in emphasis. Undergraduate legal education in India, his own included, is built around explaining what the law is — provisions, sections, rules. A master's programme, by contrast, is oriented toward why: why did the law on a given subject, say the treatment of child testimony, develop one way in India and differently in Australia or Canada, and what wider international practice suggests. Without asking why a provision exists, students end up treating a court's judgment as settled fact rather than an academic argument to be interrogated for gaps or contradictions in its reasoning. He is blunt about the consequence: "Lawyers are not spokespersons for their clients," he says, describing it as an ethical baseline — a lawyer's real task is to judge whether a legal framework fits the facts and whether it should expand or contract, work he distinguishes from what he calls a mere "legal technician." Tutors at Oxford, in his account, treat a reading list as a floor rather than a ceiling.

He connects this directly to a structural complaint about Indian precedent: courts continue to rely on judgments from the 1960s and 1970s not because nothing better exists, but because lawyers are not consistently bringing fresh scholarship and sharper argument into court. Judgment-writing, in his view, is downstream of advocacy — a judge handed a well-researched submission is more likely to advance the law than one who simply falls back on what was decided decades ago. "You are going to be the architect of future laws," he tells students, arguing that lawyers who understand the law's shortcomings owe it to the profession to elevate the courtroom advocacy that comes after them.

Diversity, in the Classroom and Behind the Podium

Rahman traces much of his thinking on this to his NALSAR professor, Amita Dhanda, who told him even while he was a student that Indian law schools lacked the diversity they were expected to have. Without students from rural backgrounds, small towns and distant regions such as Ladakh, Kashmir or the Northeast, a law school classroom becomes what he calls "a dead classroom" — everyone echoing everyone else, because the law operates very differently for different people within the same society. His own Oxford application, he recalls, turned substantially on describing what he specifically would add to classroom discussion, a criterion he thinks Indian law schools should weigh more deliberately.

He extends the same logic to faculty, arguing there is no principled reason diversity should apply to students but not teachers, since instructors from similar backgrounds tend to reproduce their own experiences. He goes further, explicitly defending constitutional reservation as one legitimate mechanism for bringing people who have suffered generations of exclusion — on grounds of caste, region or religion — into classrooms where debates about equality would otherwise be conducted without anyone who has lived their consequences. On the narrower question of domicile-based reservation, a live debate at NALSAR between 2014 and 2017, he is more circumspect: from a student's vantage, he simply wants the best teachers available, while acknowledging that a stable family life genuinely pulls teachers toward particular cities in ways unrelated to merit.

Founding ALIM

One outcome of that thinking about diversity was an informal initiative Rahman helped start with two colleagues, born out of conversations with the late Shamnad Basheer, founder of IDIA (Increasing Diversity by Increasing Access). IDIA had worked for years to bring students from disadvantaged castes and regions into national law schools, but Basheer's colleagues had noticed that Muslim students remained conspicuously underrepresented despite the community's size. Rahman and two others responded by forming an informal collective called Access to Legal Education for Muslims, or ALIM, visiting schools, identifying students who might sit the common law entrance exams, and routing them through IDIA's existing mentorship network where possible.

The barriers went beyond simply getting students admitted. Once inside a law school, a first-generation student unable to draft a confident email or turn a sentence in English would see internship applications rejected repeatedly, a pattern that reinforces itself with each rejection. ALIM's model was to stay with students through that stretch, connecting them, once admitted, to lawyers and mentors from their own regions who could vouch for them, rather than treating admission as the finish line. Rahman is candid that the effort was never institutionalised: as he and his co-founders became consumed by their own independent practices, ALIM's work continued only informally, on a personal, case-by-case basis.

A Manual for the First-Generation Lawyer

Rahman's recently published book grew out of a recorded training-video course he made for EBC Learning around 2017-18, at the suggestion of a senior named Abhinandan. Rahman initially resisted, unwilling to present himself as a subject-matter authority on arbitration or property law given the generalist nature of his practice under the senior advocate Gopal Subramanium. Abhinandan's counter-suggestion reframed the project: build a course on the basic mechanics of litigation that first-generation lawyers are rarely taught — what a "brief" actually is, how to arrange files and orders, how court filing works, and India's various "cause lists," which go by different names in different courts but follow common patterns everywhere.

As Rahman began taking on his own juniors, all of them first-generation lawyers themselves, their recurring questions sharpened the material further. After the pandemic, wanting to leave something more durable behind, he converted the course into a manuscript and sent it to Eastern Book Company, which asked for only minor revisions and added a chapter of its own on legal research and citation practice. The book appeared last year, though without the formal launch event he had hoped for. Alongside ethics and citation, it includes chapters on using technology in practice, on fee arrangements, and — his own favourite — on decision-making.

He frames the book's purpose through an analogy to Sufi pedagogy: traditional apprenticeship, in law as much as in a Sufi order, worked by sitting beside a senior and being corrected — humbled, even — before being allowed to move to the next lesson. That kind of one-on-one mentorship, he argues, is becoming scarcer simply because law schools now graduate far more students each year than there are good chambers and trainers to absorb them. The book, in his description, exists as a substitute for students who may never get access to that apprenticeship at all.

The Ethics of the Fee

The chapter on fees, Rahman suggests, addresses the most treacherous stretch for any lawyer starting out. Fee arrangements have to sit within Bar Council rules, which do not permit contingency fees — payment contingent on winning the case — a structure clients increasingly ask for after watching legal dramas on streaming platforms, but one that would give a lawyer an improper stake in the outcome. Beyond that legal bar, he lays out a working principle: fees should be commensurate with a lawyer's standing, but a lawyer should remain open to charging little or nothing when a client's circumstances genuinely demand it — someone facing the demolition of their home, or a family in acute distress. Where a lawyer cannot take on such a matter, the better course is to refer the client elsewhere. "You are here to earn money, you are not here to make money," he says, describing the distinction as central to the profession's self-understanding, and recommends fee discussions be handled by someone other than the arguing lawyer.

Why Cases Never End

Much of Rahman's account of Indian litigation turns on a simple but underappreciated point: there is rarely a single law governing a dispute, only several overlapping sets of law. A house, to use his example, sits at the intersection of ownership law, municipal planning rules and construction regulations, each carrying a different remedy. Choosing the right one, he says, is where many disputes go wrong from the outset — sometimes because a lawyer steers a client toward whichever forum matches their own practice area rather than the one best suited to the facts.

He illustrates the point with an everyday example: money lent between friends and not returned. Technically, this is a civil recovery matter. In practice, lawyers often push such cases toward a criminal complaint instead, reasoning that a civil decree, even if eventually granted, could arrive only after the litigant has died, leaving heirs to collect a debt eroded by decades of delay, whereas a police visit tends to produce faster results. The effect, Rahman argues, is that a dysfunctional civil system pushes disputes that do not belong there into the criminal system, leaving less capacity for cases that genuinely need it — murder, rape, serious economic crime. He calls for a "decluttered" system of civil adjudication as a matter of institutional planning, not merely more criminal judges.

To show how much the choice of remedy can matter, he recounts a case from his own research into the Export Credit Guarantee Corporation, a government scheme insuring Indian exporters against non-payment by foreign buyers, dating to the 1980s. When a small country's political turmoil halted payments to several Indian exporters, three companies pursued the same underlying claim through different routes. One High Court dismissed a writ petition as a mere commercial dispute; the Supreme Court later held that ECGC, though structured as a corporation, remained an arm of the state bound under Article 14 to honour its guarantee, and the companies that filed writ petitions secured relief relatively quickly. A third company, which had filed an ordinary civil suit in Bombay over identical facts, was still stuck decades later without even the formal "framing of issues" near the start of a civil trial — a case Rahman recognised, while reviewing pending litigation as a young lawyer, as the same dispute he had studied in law school as an already-decided matter, for a sibling company that had chosen the slower path.

Beyond the choice of remedy, Rahman points to more mundane sources of delay. Some are institutional: he recalls a labour court judge who held up a batch of judgments for six months for want of a stenographer who could take dictation in Hindi, insisting a migrant labourer deserved a judgment he could actually read, not one dictated efficiently in English. Others are lawyers avoiding hearings, or litigants staying loyal to an overbooked lawyer rather than switching. And judges themselves, he notes, are burdened by administrative reporting obligations apart from deciding cases.

Assam as a Laboratory

The conversation turns, toward its close, to Rahman's work before the Foreigners' Tribunals in Assam, quasi-judicial bodies that adjudicate disputed claims of Indian citizenship. He draws a direct line from that experience to the nationwide Special Intensive Revision, or SIR, of electoral rolls now underway. "Assam was a laboratory," he says, arguing that the exclusions carried out there decades ago, in which thousands of people, disproportionately women, were marked "D-voters" — doubtful voters — in 1997, are now recurring in Bihar and West Bengal, in what he calls, using a Hindi coinage, the "Assamification" of the whole country.

He draws a sharp procedural contrast between Bihar and Assam. In Bihar, the Supreme Court directed that legal aid be provided to every person excluded or doubted on the electoral rolls, with appeals heard by retired High Court judges — protections, he says, never extended in Assam. There, members of the Foreigners' Tribunals have not always needed to meet even the qualification bar for a district judgeship, a threshold lowered further over time, so that newly recruited members preside over citizenship cases after little more than a single orientation presentation — a troubling gap in protection between citizens formally covered by the same constitutional equality guarantee but treated very differently depending on which state's rolls they are on.

Rahman traces the tribunals' origin to international pressure: the Foreigners (Tribunals) Order of 1964 was designed to answer criticism that India was summarily expelling people across its borders without any hearing, by offering an administrative hearing that could satisfy norms rooted in international human rights. He notes tribunal members serve on renewable three-year contracts, and cites a High Court judgment — arising from a challenge by a terminated member — recording arguments that renewal could turn on how a member had been deciding cases. He connects this to a larger point: due process, as read into Article 21, was not explicit in the Constitution's original 1950 text, but the country cannot argue backward from a settled guarantee. Law, in his framing, does not get to regress once a society has advanced past a given standard.

What the Law Is For

Asked, finally, what the law's social function actually is — put in the plainest possible terms — Rahman frames it as a matter of responsibility rather than compliance. Knowing the law means understanding not only one's own rights but other people's, and being willing to help others exercise theirs, even where that help extends to protecting a view one personally disagrees with. Society, in his account, advances through a continuous churn of argument and disagreement over what the law should be; when that churn stops, so does the society's own development — a fitting note on which to end a conversation that, across two decades of practice, keeps returning to one conviction: the quality of a country's law is inseparable from the seriousness of the people arguing it into being.