Chamila Talagala in Facebook
They say Sri Lankans hate lawyers. But that hatred is not simple. It is older than the island’s courts, older even than the black coats and the Latin phrases. It is the bitterness people feel toward a world that has always spoken over them – a world where words, not justice, decide who wins.
From the beginning, law everywhere – in Rome, in London, in Colombo – was never the language of the common man. In Rome, the orators and jurists came from patrician families, educated in rhetoric, trained in the art of twisting reason into advantage. In Britain, law was a gentleman’s profession, spoken in Latin and Norman French long after the people had forgotten both tongues. It was exclusive by design – the law was not meant to be understood; it was meant to be obeyed.
When the British carried their laws to Ceylon, they carried that same arrogance – the idea that justice was a performance reserved for the learned few. The colonial courts were temples of formality. The robes, the wigs, the English phrases – all reminders that this was not a system built for the villager or the fisherman. And yet, from this carefully controlled space, something unpredictable emerged: a new class of Ceylonese lawyers who learned the master’s rules a little too well.
At first, they served the Empire dutifully – interpreters of the Crown, defenders of plantation companies, advisers to governors. The British trusted them. But soon, these polite interpreters began to argue against the hand that fed them. The courtroom, designed to enforce order, became a small theatre of resistance.
The Bracegirdle incident was the turning point. When the Governor tried to deport Mark Bracegirdle, an Australian who supported plantation workers, it was local lawyers who stood up to the colonial administration – and won. The British were stunned. The very law they had written to protect their rule had been turned against them. The black coats they had trained became their tormentors. From then on, the British saw the Ceylonese lawyer not as a loyal interpreter, but as a troublemaker – articulate, dangerous, and impossible to silence.
After independence, those same legal minds went on to shape the new nation. CWW Kannangara, a lawyer, became the architect of “free education”, breaking the monopoly of privilege and opening the classroom to the village child. SWRD Bandaranaike, another lawyer, turned the rhetoric of welfare into a national philosophy – free healthcare, food subsidies, and a social vision that sought to give dignity to the rural poor. Under his leadership, the state began to speak in the language of equality rather than hierarchy: subsidised rice, village development, rural electrification, and the beginnings of land reform. Bandaranaike’s politics may have divided the country in other ways, but his social welfare policies marked a profound moral shift – a belief that government existed not to rule, but to serve.
The tradition continued into later decades. Lalith Athulathmudali, yet another lawyer of formidable intellect, founded the “Mahapola Scholarship Programme” – a simple but revolutionary idea that bright students, regardless of wealth, should have the means to pursue higher education. Mahapola quietly transformed generations, lifting rural children into professions their parents could never have dreamed of. Even here, the lawyer’s hand shaped the landscape of social mobility, proving that legal minds were not only the architects of power but also of opportunity.
And then came Lakshman Kadirgamar – the lawyer who carried Sri Lanka’s voice to the world. Calm, precise, and devastatingly articulate, he turned diplomacy into an art of intellect rather than flattery. In an age when the nation was isolated and wounded by war, Kadirgamar defended it not with soldiers, but with sentences. He argued before the international community with the same elegance he once argued before judges – and he won respect for a country that had nearly lost its reputation. Through him, the black coat stood again for discipline, grace, and courage. His assassination was not just the loss of a statesman, but the silencing of one of the few voices that could speak truth in the language the world would listen to.
JR Jayewardene, also a lawyer, drafted the 1978 Constitution, inserting “Fundamental Rights” into its text – and, at the same time, expanding presidential power to the limits of democracy. It is fashionable to condemn Jayewardene – to call him authoritarian, to recall the violence and manipulation of his era. Yet the irony is inescapable: the very “Fundamental Rights jurisdiction” he introduced has become the single most powerful instrument available to the ordinary citizen. Every time a journalist is silenced, a worker dismissed unjustly, or a detainee abused, it is that same jurisdiction – born under Jayewardene’s watch – that allows the people to drag the state itself before the court. Whatever his political sins, the mechanism he left behind still curbs the excesses of power, even those of the presidency he once magnified. The people may scorn his memory, but they live daily under the protection of the rights he enshrined.
Still, the people’s relationship with lawyers remained uneasy. They admired them in times of danger and despised them in times of peace. During the terror of 88-89, when bodies disappeared and mothers wandered from police station to police station, it was lawyers who dared to file petitions, demand answers, and face death threats. The people whispered blessings for them then. And again, in 2022, during the “Aragalaya”, when the streets filled with anger, it was lawyers who stood with the crowds – shielding the young from unlawful arrest, facing tear gas, and demanding that the law remember its conscience. Once more, the people applauded.
But applause in this country never lasts. The moment calm returned, so did the old complaints.
“Lawyers are crooks. They’ll take your money and drag your case for years.”
The black coat that once symbolised courage became again a sign of cunning. Praise turned to resentment, admiration to mockery.
And it is not only lawyers. The same fate befell doctors. Once celebrated as “Suwa Wiruwo” – the noble healers of the nation, saviours of life itself – they too are now accused of greed, arrogance, and detachment. In times of plague, flood, or war, the doctor is a saint. When the crisis ends, he becomes a parasite. The people turn their gratitude into suspicion, their awe into anger. Both the lawyer and the doctor live under the same curse: professions once sacred, now distrusted for their privilege and their power.
Perhaps that is inevitable. Law and medicine both began as the crafts of elites – closed circles of knowledge, wrapped in ceremony and distance. They served kings before they served people. They spoke in languages the common man could not follow. And though time has opened the doors, the aura of superiority still lingers. The villager who walks into a courtroom or a hospital still feels like an intruder in a foreign world.
Even in ancient Rome, the crowd watched the advocates with a mixture of awe and contempt. They admired their eloquence, but hated their power – the way a few well-chosen words could save a guilty man or destroy an innocent one. In every age, in every land, the law has been the property of those who can afford to master it. The resentment that follows is not merely social – it is existential. It is the feeling of standing before a system that can crush you politely.
So, yes, Sri Lankans say they hate lawyers. But what they really hate is what lawyers remind them of: that justice has always been a game with rules written by someone else. Yet, when the state grows cruel, when freedom collapses, when speech itself becomes dangerous, the people still turn to the same black coats they curse. Because even if the lawyer speaks for the privileged, he is also the last one left who dares to speak at all.
And that is the lawyer’s curse – to be needed and hated, trusted and despised, a creature of privilege who sometimes becomes the people’s only hope. The British built him to serve empire, and he ended up a thorn in their side. The people mock him, but cannot do without him. And perhaps, in that uneasy balance – between admiration and resentment, power and conscience – lies the true, tragic destiny of the lawyer in Sri Lanka.
