By Sarath de Alwis –

I write this brief missive on 12^th August. If I am published tomorrow 13th August and wake up, it happens to be my 84th birth anniversary. As my shadow length opens across the evening of my life, it is time I added my non-lawyer’s two cents to the debate.

Justice has remained the most elusive goal of humankind. ‘Justice’ has been continuously redefined across human history—from cosmic harmony as explained by Plato in ancient times, to obligation-based ethics of Immanuel Kant in the late-modern era, and finally to the contemporary frameworks of liberal democracy and capitalism.

Today, our island nation seeks this elusive ideal while tightly bound to global economic structures and the stringent realities of the IMF, from which we cannot seemingly extricate ourselves.

It is within this gridlock that we must analyze the home front battle over judicial reform. The National People’s Power (NPP) framework—exemplified by its proposed 22nd Amendment—aims to address systemic backlogs and ensure citizens receive speedier, accessible, and fair justice.

Conversely, the institutional inertia of the Bar Association of Sri Lanka (BASL) seems intent on preserving a presently entrenched culture of physical diaries, systemic delays, and endless postponements. It is as if they treat the gridlock of human lives as a mere sample page from the slim diaries they produce for lawyers—ironically sold at Rs. 800 apiece.

I fully understand the Chagrin clouding the cherubic countenance of the BASL president.

I have no desire to tread Lawyers’ territory or on the complexities of deciding the retirement age in our Judicial System.

My concerns are simple. People desire Justice. Not long hours in consultations in chambers of eminent counsel where young lawyers refer to their master counsel as ‘Sir”.  It is the Master Sir edifice that the NPP desires to demolish.

I have in my day seen these trapeze artists perform in their elegant Book Lined Chambers.

In his theory of Justice John Rawls wrote:

“Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought. A theory however elegant and economical must be rejected or revised if it is untrue; likewise, laws and institutions no matter how efficient and well-arranged must be reformed or abolished if they are unjust.”

In his tome Idea of Justice Amartya Sens wrote:

To understand the world is never a matter of simply recording our immediate perceptions. Understanding inescapably involves reasoning. We must ‘read’ what we feel and seem to see and ask what those perceptions indicate and how we may take them into account without being overwhelmed by them. One issue relates to the reliability of our feelings and impressions. A sense of injustice could serve as a signal that moves us, but a signal does demand critical examination, and there has to be some scrutiny of the soundness of a conclusion based mainly on signals…We also have to ask what kinds of reasoning should count in the assessment of ethical and political concepts such as justice and injustice.”

Reader should forgive me for these lengthy extracts. I am running out of time. I see no logic in reinventing the wheel.

This clash is perfectly explained by modern political philosophy. John Rawls saw ‘Justice as Fairness,’ arguing that a just society must architect its institutions to protect the basic liberties of all citizens, particularly prioritizing the least advantaged.

However, Economist Philosopher Amartya Sen took this further by drawing from classical Indian philosophy to distinguish between Niti and Nyaya.

Niti represents organizational propriety, behavioral correctness, and formal institutional rules. Nyaya, on the other hand, is concerned with the actual lives that people can lead and the elimination of manifest injustices in the real world.

The tragedy of the Sri Lankan legal fraternity is that it has become utterly obsessed with Niti—protecting an archaic, procedural bureaucracy of delays and physical ledger entries—while remaining completely blind to Nyaya, which is the substantive realization of justice for the ordinary citizen. While the state navigates macro-capitalism and IMF mandates at the top, the citizen at the bottom is denied fundamental fairness by an institutional gatekeeper that measures human suffering by the price of a lawyer’s diary.

True judicial reform must break this cycle, moving us past the empty rituals of Niti and finally delivering the livable reality of Nyaya to our people.”