Paper short abstract

The paper examines three sites within the Supreme Court of India's complex to postulate and explicate the impact of the atmospheric conditions surrounding the bar and bench on judicial law-making and constitutional adjudication, drawing on ethnographic observation and exploration.

Paper long abstract

Stephen Legg, in his various works on the Indian colonial and postcolonial law-making and structuring, provides due emphasis on the atmospherics and geospatial organisation of spaces to examine their impact. For him, then, the atmosphere of London not only impacted the members in terms of their fashion choices but also modulated their actions and conversations. Based on the ideas and conceptual formulation of Legg, the paper looks at the atmosphere of the Supreme Court of India’s complex situated in the heart of New Delhi, the capital city. The atmospherics intervention is multi-faceted, and this paper highlights how this atmosphere, of the complex, in terms of physical geography, climate, political hotspots, discourse, shaped the conversations, mindsets and understandings of law inside the complex and in the courtrooms as a result. The law made and dictated in these courtrooms is not then based on the content and facts of the matter, but the atmospheric conditions that surround bar and bench. The paper works through ethnographic observation and exploration of three sites - the Chief Justice’s Court, Supreme Court Bar Association Library 1, and the Food Street to note the conversations, political temperature and resultant combined force of these atmospherics to explicate the impact of atmosphere.

The paper highlights how the architecture, infrastructure, and material composition, among other facets of atmosphere, impact the functioning of India’s Apex Court, more often than the legal anthropologists and theorists recognise, therefore, magnifying the ‘atmosphere of the complex’ in the gaze of legal research.