Supreme Whispers Conversations with Judges of the Supreme Court of India

In 1980 a brilliant young American scholar George H. Gadbois Jr. met five judges of the Supreme Court of India. The judges gave him astonishing details about what they actually thought of their colleagues about the inner workings and politics of the court their interactions with the government and the judicial appointments process among many other things. This was only the beginning. Over the course of that decade Gadbois visited India on two more occasions and conducted over 116 interviews with more than sixty-six judges of the Supreme Court of India (nineteen of whom held the post of chief justice of India)and others such as senior lawyers politicians relatives of deceased judges and court staff. During each meeting Gadbois diligently took down handwritten notes which he later typed up on his typewriter recording nearly every detail of what the judges had told him sometimes to a fault.Relying on these typewritten interviews Abhinav Chandrachud sheds light on a decade of politics decision-making and legal culture in the Supreme Court of India. This book yields a fascinating glimpse into the secluded world of the judges of the Supreme Court in the 1980s and earlier. About the Author Abhinav Chandrachud is an advocate who practises at the Bombay High Court. He graduated from the LL.M. program at Harvard Law School where he was a Dana Scholar and from the JSM and JSD programs at Stanford Law School where he was a Franklin Family Scholar. He has worked as an associate attorney at Gibson Dunn & Crutcher a global law firm. He is the author of Republic of Rhetoric Free Speech and the Constitution of India (2017) andSupreme Whispers Conversations with Judges of the Supreme Court of India 1980-1989 (2018). He has also written for several leading newspapers in India includingThe Hindu Indian Express andTimes of India and taught at Cornell Law School and NALSAR University of Law.