DURING my years of teaching I often asked students who wanted to major in political science what they intended to do with it after graduation. Many of them said they wanted to go to a law school. The nexus between law and politics goes back a long time, both in areas of formal study and practice.

It is no accident that lawyers (or those who have had legal training) have high visibility in the politics of many countries, especially democracies. I don’t have an exact count, but I have the impression that a substantial number of members of the two Houses of the United States Congress, 50 state legislatures, and thousands of city and town councils consists of law graduates, many of them practising lawyers. The same holds for a fair number of state governors and city mayors.

One may ask what exactly the connection between law and politics is. In the first place, there is the obvious commonality, to wit, that many of those who run for elective offices in democratic polities end up as members of legislatures. They make and write laws. Lawyers are in the business of studying the law, analysing its various facets and implications, and applying it in the adjudication of disputes for the benefit of their clients.

In one of the Federalist Papers, James Madison, “father” of the American constitution, wrote that law would be of no avail to the citizen if it were so voluminous that he could not read it, or composed in such tedious language that he could not understand it.

Some commentators have argued that this nexus between law and politics should be abolished, and lawyers taken out of politics, because it works to the ordinary citizen’s disadvantage. It makes for a basic conflict of interests.

Since many of the lawmakers are, or have been, lawyers, they choose to make the law unnecessarily copious and unintelligible to the ordinary citizen, knowing that if he does not understand it, he will have to come to them for understanding and advice, for which they may charge a hefty fee. This, in my view, is not a weighty objection, for professional draftsmen can be called in who will, if so instructed, take ambiguities and tediousness out, incorporate the legislature’s intent, and write the text so as to make it intelligible to the ordinary reader.

Other commonalities between the two professions may be noted. The lawmaker and the lawyer should both be able to state their preferred positions clearly and coherently; should be effective public speakers; should have learned to listen to the opposing side, identify a middle ground (especially when the contest is not between right and wrong but between two rights), which may serve as the basis for a compromise, or an out-of-court settlement; should be able to change course when an initial position has become untenable. They deal with the “white collar” constituents or clients as well as the unwashed.

Lawyers contest elections for executive office also. Of the 42 American presidents 26 are said to have had legal training even though two of them (Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln) never went to college. It seems that in those days (early and mid-19th century) a self-educated person could pass some sort of an exam and get admitted to a state bar.

John Adams, Jackson, Lincoln, and William Howard Taft did actually practise law before they became president. Alexander Hamilton, who was one of America’s founding fathers and later treasury secretary in George Washington’s administration, had a thriving law practice in New York City before he entered public service. Franklin Roosevelt, Jack Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and George Bush, among numerous others, would not appear to have practised law for any great length of time.

Lawyers’ participation in city politics in America seems to have declined considerably during the last 30 years or so. Until about the mid-1970s, the volume of litigation was not very large and the average lawyer had time for civic projects, reform and other tasks in local government and politics.

Given the inclination, he was free and able to participate. Two changes have been taking place since then. The volume of litigation has increased enormously. Persons, corporations, and government agencies are a lot more inclined to go to court against one another than they were ever before. As a result, lawyers have become much too busy to take an interest in civic affairs.

Normally a lawyer employed in a halfway decent firm has to work more than 80 hours a week, keep old clients and bring new ones, and generate business for his company if he expects to be taken as a partner, and begin making real money, in any foreseeable future. Being away from home during most of the waking hours on any number of days, he is lucky if his wife and children don’t desert him. The second change is that the enormous cost of advertising in the print and electronic media, and that of hiring workers to carry a candidate’s message from door to door, have made election campaigns frightfully expensive.

A modestly successful lawyer who makes, let us say, $100,000 a year, and who therefore has time and energy left for politics, does not have the money, or influence that will generate contributions, to run for elective office. This is not to say that lawyers have entirely disappeared from local politics, but true it is that their presence is now much reduced.

In our own subcontinent, lawyers had a significant presence in the freedom movement, and among its more notable leaders, the makers of independent India and Pakistan. M.K. Gandhi, the two Nehrus (Motilal and Jawaharlal), and Sardar Patel, among many others, in the Congress party had had legal education.

Motilal Nehru flourished as a practising lawyer. On the Muslim side, Mr M.A. Jinnah was one of the most renowned practising lawyers in all of India. Ameer Ali had been a great jurist. Sir Ali Imam, Liaquat Ali Khan, Hussain Shaheed Suhrawardy, and in Punjab Allama Iqbal, Mian Fazl-i-Hussain, Mian Mohammad Shafi, Malik Barkat Ali, Sheikh Mohammad Amin and Sir Mohammad Zafrulla Khan had had legal training even if some of them did not actually practise law.

In post-independence Pakistan many persons elected or appointed to public office were, and are, lawyers. One would normally expect them to be vigorous proponents of democracy, which allows liberty, equality, and individual rights to be preserved.

Defending these values is a vital function of the legal profession and an important source of income for its members. But traditionally Pakistani lawyers would not seem to have entertained a particularly strong commitment to democracy.

Some of the country’s best known lawyers cooperated with, or served, autocrats and military dictators without giving it a second thought. For instance, Khurshid Ahmad Khan, S.M. Zafar, and Manzur Qadir happily served as ministers under Ayub Khan.Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, also a lawyer by training, did the same until he figured out that the ship on which he had been sailing to fame and glory was about to sink. Sharifuddin Pirzada has been, and continues to be, more than willing, indeed eager, to place his considerable knowledge of the ambiguities and loopholes in the law at the service of military rulers.

The higher judiciary, on the whole, have done likewise. They discovered the doctrine of necessity in the writings of Muslim mediaeval jurists, and later in those of Bracton, to legitimise military coups and then went out of their way to authorise the coup makers to rewrite, and in the process mutilate and corrupt, the country’s Constitution.

An exception to this trend on the part of Pakistani judges and lawyers should be noted. The late Mian Mahmud Ali Kasuri, an illustrious lawyer, was an internationally known fighter in the cause of democracy and human rights in his day.

Son of a well-known lawyer and freedom fighter, Maulana Abdul Qadir Kasuri, he himself was active in the struggle against British rule and went to jail for a time in 1930, when he was only 20 years of age. Once in the National Awami Party, he was later one of the founding members of the Pakistan People’s Party, served as minister for law and parliamentary affairs in 1972, and then parted company with Mr Bhutto because of his authoritarian leanings and his administration’s brutal treatment of opposition politicians.

He was one of the few politicians in Pakistan who gave up high office on a point of principle. He then joined Asghar Khan’s Tehrik-i-Istaqlal and stayed with it until his death. Standing to the left of centre in politics, he served on Bertrand Russell’s “international tribunal” to try Americans for war crimes in Vietnam. He defended the NAP leaders when Mr Bhutto’s government prosecuted them on charges of high treason. He founded the Civil Liberties Union for the protection of human rights.

We are currently witnessing a radical, and abrupt, change in the disposition of Pakistani lawyers. Their sustained protest movement against General Musharraf’s rough and clumsy handling of the Chief Justice since March 9 is an interesting and welcome development.

There is a lot more to their movement than the issue of judicial independence. That is how it started but within a couple of weeks it became a struggle for the removal of military rule and restoration of democracy. Leaders of the country’s bar councils and bar associations have said repeatedly that their movement will not stop until military rule ends and democracy returns.

Professional groups, political activists, and the general public have joined hands with them. Lawyers are a vital organ in civil society, and it is entirely fit and proper that they should concern themselves with issues of political decency and social improvement.

Sceptics may ask what a few thousand lawyers can accomplish. It should be instructive to recall the advice of Margaret Mead, a celebrated British anthropologist and political theorist: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful and committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it is the only thing that ever has” (changed the world).

The writer is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, US. Email: anwarsyed@cox.net

THE course of Pakistan’s politics, always unpredictable, contains many lessons which the parties involved in the current phase of its turbulence can only ignore at their peril. Two of the more important ones are being recalled here.

The first is that processions and strikes may bring about the fall of a tired or unrepresentative government but that, in the chaos, the army takes over and the elections are postponed, not advanced. The second lesson is that every attempt by the government to demonstrate its popularity when its fall appears imminent only hastens its departure.

If the lawyers and judges do not confine their struggle to the Supreme Court and the ruling party bosses insist on calling out a million men to outnumber the Chief Justice’s processions (so says Chaudhry Shujaat Husain), the current crisis may follow the same course and end up the same way as the crises of 1968 and 1977 did with the army moving in and staying on.

Since that is not the intention either of the government or the opposition, both have a common interest in avoiding the proclamation of emergency with its inevitable consequence of elections being postponed and, worse still, the army moving in.

The Supreme Court that has been drawn into every political affray on the forcible change of regime grudgingly provided legal cover to what it could not undo. However, never was the integrity of the court and the impartiality of its judges called into question by politicians and lawyers as is being done now.

It is an unfortunate but understandable situation, considering that the Chief Justice stands at the centre of a legal conflict which is turning into a political movement and its outcome will also have a bearing on the career of the judges.

The humiliation and harm caused to the judiciary as an institution and to the person of the Chief Justice cannot be deplored enough. The more disturbing aspect, however, is that the source of reference against the Chief Justice, and his harassment that followed, is believed to be General Musharraf, who, as head of state, is expected to be the ultimate custodian of the independence of the judiciary and the safety of the Chief Justice.

If the parliamentary system were properly working in the country, the wrangle, despite the Seventeenth Amendment, should have been between the prime minister and the Chief Justice. The president should not have been accused either of bias against the Chief Justice or of harassing him as the reference and its aftermath all lay in the jurisdiction of the prime minister. In the furor that followed, the president should have appeared as a neutral umpire rather than as the author of the reference and the tormentor.

At the root of all policies and decisions of the present government lies the problem of credibility and so it has been in this sad episode. No one — be it the man on the street or the one sitting at the apex of the country’s judicial system — is prepared to believe that the decision to make the reference to the Supreme Judicial Council was, in fact, made by the prime minister, and the president, acting on the constitutionally binding advice of the prime minister, merely conveyed it to the Chief Justice, and that he was also unaware of what happened later on that fateful day.

Through the Seventeenth Amendment, President Musharraf has acquired certain executive powers but essentially he remains the head of state. The chief executive is the prime minister. The common perception, and also the ground reality, however, is that Musharraf acts as the chief executive in any matter that catches his fancy or that has bearing on his importance at home or on his role in foreign affairs.

The government, nevertheless, is called parliamentary and Gen Musharraf, too, insists that it is so, but there is a caveat. The Supreme Court, while validating the army’s extra-constitutional intervention, “to fill a political vacuum and bridge the gap” also empowered him, ironically, to amend the Constitution wherever its existing provisions failed “to provide a solution for attainment of his declared objectives”.

Nevertheless, the court prohibited him from tampering with the parliamentary form of government and federal structure of the state. He could not do that till the religious parties provided him the requisite support to substantially alter both three years later through the Legal Framework Order.

With the benefit of hindsight it can be said that had Musharraf not ventured into the executive domain of the prime minister and had he given up the army command and, more importantly, had he not adopted the PML-Q, a feckless lot, as his own party, all the confrontation of the past five years — with the Baloch sardars and Waziristan tribes, with the politicians and the clerics and now with the Chief Justice and the lawyers — would not have taken place.

In fact, in all these situations he could have played a conciliatory role. Now, all those aggrieved by the actions of the government can take recourse only to the streets or to the courts, or hide in the hills or barricade themselves in mosques for all critical decisions are made by the president.

Howsoever persuasive Gen Musharraf may now sound, neither the people at large nor the legal community is prepared to believe that the reference originated with the prime minister, that he merely passed it on and that the local administration is to be blamed for the shabby treatment meted out to the Chief Justice.

In the handling of the reference, whether the government acted in bad faith or just blundered or goofed, the commotion caused is escalating into a mass protest with the Chief Justice leading political processions on the highways across the country. It would be unwise if the ruling party were to mount a matching protest. It might prove the first step towards an extra-constitutional change which, surely, neither side wants.

Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry’s declared purpose in tirelessly crisis-crossing the country may be to address the bars but his real appeal is to the gallery. Chaudhry Aitzaz Ahsan, counsel of the Chief Justice, is his campaign manager in the processions. The judiciary and politics are thus yoked together. The politicians by leaning on angry lawyers may be able to topple the present order but the judges may not be able to extricate themselves from the minefield of politics.

Having come this far, the lawyers and judges should now return to cool reasoning in the Supreme Court and the Supreme Judicial Council. They have broken the stillness and created conditions conducive to a political settlement. They have rewritten the “doctrine of necessity” in a different, refreshing way. It is a contribution valuable and unprecedented but they should stop here and pass the baton on to the politicians.