Some Exemplary Sri Lankan Legal Luminaries in the Recent Past

Dr. Chamila S. Talagala

For the lawyers who took their oath last week, and for everyone who still believes this profession is worth saving.

There is a courtroom complex in Colombo that lawyers still call by its old name, Hulftsdorp, long after the British left and the Republic was born. Its corridors have carried the footsteps of giants of the Bar, the quiet anxieties of litigants, and the slow, formal cadence of judgments that shaped a nation. Anyone who has walked those passages for thirty years or more will tell you, often without being asked, that something has changed. The trust once placed in lawyers and the quiet authority that used to precede a senior counsel into a room, none of it is what it was twenty-five years ago, let alone fifty. This is not nostalgia speaking. It is an observation that deserves honest investigation rather than a shrug.

 

The instinct of any institution that feels its standing slipping is to legislate the feeling away, to reach for legal provisions conferring privileges and statutory protections, as though respect could be conjured into existence by the law. Sri Lanka has not been short of such legal instruments, from the contempt powers vested in the courts to the protections written into the rules that govern the profession itself. Yet respect has never worked this way, in Sri Lanka or anywhere else. An American jurist, Louis Brandeis, put the underlying truth in a single line that has outlived him by nearly a century. If we desire respect for the law, he said, we must first make the law respectable. Respect is not granted by statute. It is the residue of conduct.

This is worth dwelling on, because the very people who once held the legal profession in the highest regard in this country were never coerced into it. They simply watched, and judged, and concluded that here was someone worthy of looking up to.

I was fortunate enough, early in my career, to glimpse this at close quarters. My guru in the profession was Mr. H. L. de Silva, President’s Counsel, a name that still commands a hush in any gathering of Sri Lankan lawyers of a certain generation. Everyone knew where his political sympathies lay. He was, as most people understood, aligned with the SLFP. And yet lawyers and politicians from every other party held him in the same regard as his own. It was not his politics that earned that respect, and it was certainly not the car he travelled in. It was his honesty, his formidable ability, the dignity with which he carried himself in court and in society, and a decency that simply could not be manufactured.

I had the privilege of being involved, in a very small way, in the last appearance Mr. de Silva made in court. My task was modest, some research into overseas precedent, and a rather more mundane errand, arranging a Bar Association Car Pass for his vehicle, a Nissan Sunny, so that it could cross the security checkpoint into the Hulftsdorp court premises. Sri Lanka was at war at the time, and even counsel of his stature needed a sticker pass to get past the barricades. I remember it vividly, because it captured something essential about the gentleman. A giant of the Bar, arriving in an unassuming car, required to stop at a checkpoint like everyone else, and losing not one particle of the respect that surrounded him for it.

It was my senior, Mr. D. S. Wijesinghe, President’s Counsel, who put this into words I have never forgotten. He once remarked that when respect has been earned through capability, honesty, and standing, a gentleman does not need a luxury vehicle to claim it. Even if Mr. de Silva were to arrive at court in a three-wheeler, he said, he would still be H. L., still the giant of the profession, and everyone would still rise for him.

I recall that story now, deliberately, at a time when serious concerns are being raised about the conduct of the legal profession in Sri Lanka. It is worth asking what made gentlemen like Mr. de Silva so universally respected, because the answer is not flattering to anyone who believes that respect can be claimed through title, dress, or the trappings of success. It cannot. Respect from law enforcement, from state institutions, and from the public is not a privilege handed down. It is something the profession must continue to earn, generation after generation.

This is, in fact, an old truth, and one that a great Sri Lankan jurist set out with characteristic erudition. The late Judge C. G. Weeramantry, who would go on to serve as Vice President of the International Court of Justice, once traced the legal profession back to Rome, where advocates studied law and counselled clients as an intellectual pursuit and a public service rather than a trade. They were, in the earliest conception of the profession, wealthy enough not to need fees at all, and Roman law at one point actually barred advocates from taking them. The very word client carries this history inside it. A Roman commoner looked to an advocate the way one would look to a patron, for protection and guidance, not as a customer looks to a shopkeeper.

Judge Weeramantry’s lament, writing decades ago, was that this noble origin had been all but forgotten, that lawyers had begun to advertise themselves like businessmen chasing custom, and that fees, once a matter of no real importance, had become for many the dominant consideration. He was not arguing that the profession should set itself above the public it serves. His point was narrower and more pointed, that law loses something essential the moment it is treated purely as a trade where money is the chief motive for action. Sri Lanka, with its own deep historical reverence for Roman Dutch legal tradition, inherited this dignity directly, and it is precisely this inheritance that seems to be eroding within living memory.

None of this is to say that the legal profession in Sri Lanka does not, properly, enjoy real privileges. It does. Rights of audience, privileged access to court records, the protections that allow a counsel to argue fearlessly on behalf of a client, all of these exist for a reason. They are the tools that allow lawyers to serve justice without fear or favour. But a privilege granted for one purpose is not a license to be misused for another. When it is, the damage is not confined to the individual who abused it. It falls on the whole Bar.

Sri Lanka’s own Supreme Court provided, not long ago, an unfortunate but instructive illustration of exactly this danger. The matter began when the Registrar of the Court of Appeal complained that an Attorney-at-Law had applied to inspect an original case record under a false name and had then torn two pages out of it. This led the Supreme Court to commence separate disciplinary proceedings against him.

What makes this case so instructive is the language the Court itself chose to use. The judgment noted plainly that access to a case record is a privilege granted only to a member of the Bar, and that breaching such a privilege, and the trust that comes with it, brings the entire profession into disrepute. It is a small case in the great sweep of Sri Lankan jurisprudence, but it captures the principle perfectly. Privilege exists because trust was extended, and when that trust is abused, it is the entire profession’s standing that absorbs the blow, not merely the individual disciplined for it.

In considering an earlier matter, the Court made a point that deserves to be remembered well beyond the case in which it was said. A judiciary that is governed under the rule of law must not only be credible, it must also command the confidence of the public, because without that confidence it loses its ability to function at all. The same is true, in equal measure, of the profession that appears before it.

This is why these concerns cannot simply be allowed to drift. They need to be investigated, named honestly within the profession itself, and addressed, by the Bar Association of Sri Lanka, by other relevant authorities, and by the law schools that train the next generation of lawyers. Sri Lanka would not be the first jurisdiction to face this reckoning, nor is the warning a new one. Over a century ago, the American jurist Roscoe Pound delivered a now famous address on the causes of popular dissatisfaction with the administration of justice, a lecture still cited today because the underlying problem he identified has never fully gone away in any legal system. When ordinary people lose faith in the fairness and integrity of those who administer justice, the damage spreads far beyond the reputations of individual lawyers and judges.

That is the real stake in this conversation, and it is worth stating plainly. If these concerns are left unaddressed, the loss will not be the legal profession’s alone. The danger is that ordinary Sri Lankans, litigants, witnesses, accused persons, citizens who have never set foot in a courtroom but who rely on the rule of law every day of their lives, will begin to despise the profession charged with upholding justice. And a public that despises its lawyers and distrusts its courts does not simply withdraw its respect. It withdraws its faith in the entire system of administration of justice, the very mechanism a democratic society depends upon to settle its disputes peacefully and resolve its wrongs fairly.

To the gentlemen and ladies who stood before the Supreme Court only last week and took their oath as Attorneys-at-Law for the first time, this history belongs to you now, whether anyone tells you so or not. Nobody can hand you the respect that Mr. H. L. de Silva carried, and no certificate of enrolment can manufacture it on your behalf. It will be earned, case by case, client by client, year by year, in exactly the same way it was earned by every member of the Bar who came before you. The privilege you have just been given is real, and so is the trust that comes with it. What you do with both is now entirely in your own hands.

Mr. H. L. de Silva never needed an extravagant vehicle or ostentatious possessions to be respected, because what he offered the profession could not be faked. That is the standard worth returning to, not because the law demands it, but because nothing else ever truly earns it.

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A NOTE:

Dr TALAGALLA  has these in his CV ….. 

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