When courts step out of chambers to deliver justice where it’s needed most

There are moments when the judiciary’s duty cannot end at the courtroom door. When justice must step out of its solemn chambers and walk into a world trembling under fear, ignorance, or calamity. The idea that law exists only to decide disputes is too narrow for a Constitution that envisions justice as a living, breathing promise.

That promise, over the past year, has found new expression. When victims of “digital arrest” scams began losing money, and faith, to faceless cyber predators, it was not a law enforcement body but the legal services institutions, under the guidance of Justice Surya Kant, that rose to say what no penal statute had yet said so clearly: Law doesn’t arrest online.

When convicts without counsel languished in Punjab’s prisons, the same vision translated into Mission Mode Punjab — a movement that filed 406 criminal appeals for unrepresented prisoners, restoring to them the right to be heard. And when torrential rains devastated Himachal Pradesh, it was again the judiciary, led by Chief Justice Gurmeet Singh Sandhawalia and structured under Justice Surya Kant’s Legal Services framework, that called upon conscience itself — creating the Chief Justice Disaster Relief Fund 2025 to reach those who had lost everything.

Each of these efforts may appear administrative or humanitarian. Yet, beneath them lies a profound legal philosophy: that access to justice is not confined to access to courts.

Article 39-A of the Constitution mandates the State to ensure that justice is not denied to any citizen by reason of economic or other disabilities. The Legal Services Authorities Act, born of that mandate, empowers judicial institutions not merely to adjudicate but to actualise justice. The shift, therefore, is not activism — it is constitutional fidelity.

Justice Surya Kant’s model of a “responsive judiciary” redefines this fidelity. It views legal aid not as charity, but as infrastructure; outreach not as optics, but as obligation. Whether it is cyber awareness for pensioners, parole facilitation for convicts, or disaster relief for the dispossessed, the thread that binds them is empathy made operational through law. It is the same jurisprudential impulse that Justice Krishna Iyer once described as “compassion speaking through the Constitution.”

For too long, the judiciary was imagined as a tower — aloof, majestic, but distant. These new initiatives recast it as a bridge. A bridge between the citizen and the law, between fear and remedy, between despair and dignity. When a senior citizen is told not to fear a fake police call, when a prisoner finds his appeal finally filed, when a family in the hills receives help through a High Court fund — justice, in those moments, ceases to be abstract. It becomes tactile.

To some, this may seem a journey beyond jurisdiction. To others, it is a homecoming — to the Constitution’s first promise: to secure justice — social, economic and political. Courts may not govern, but they can guide. They may not administer relief, but they can awaken conscience. In times of moral disarray and digital deception, that awakening is not just desirable. It is indispensable.

The larger constitutional question this evolution poses is about the judiciary’s moral jurisdiction. When social fractures deepen, when fear or misinformation becomes the citizen’s daily encounter with authority, can the judiciary remain a spectator? The framers never meant justice to be passive. The Constitution does not envision the courts as mere arbiters of legality, but as guardians of humanity. Every outreach campaign, every Lok Adalat, every call to conscience echoes the preambular pledge of fraternity — the idea that justice is not transactional but transformative.

This, perhaps, is the judiciary’s new grammar of empathy — an attempt to translate constitutional morality into public experience. When the courts reach out through legal services authorities, they reaffirm that justice is not something bestowed from above, but something built collectively from below. The citizen is not merely the subject of law; he is its purpose.

The Indian Constitution, more than any other postcolonial charter, treats justice not as a conclusion but as a continuum. From legal aid to legal literacy, from adjudication to awareness, the journey of justice must flow seamlessly. In that continuity lies the strength of democracy itself.

And so, when the judiciary steps out of court — to protect a pensioner from a cyber fraudster, to restore a prisoner’s voice, or to rebuild a life buried under debris — it is not straying from its role. It is returning to its roots. The verdict may end in court, but justice, as the Constitution reminds us, must begin everywhere.