[Book Review]: The Bench, the Bar, and the Bizarre by Tushar Mehta: The absurd theatre of the legal profession

Lawyers spend a large part of their professional lives pretending that the legal system is an entirely rational and dignified enterprise.

The courtroom is often a stage - a judge threatens contempt because someone interrupted at the wrong time, a lawyer says “I am obliged” immediately after being demolished in court, or an entire hearing collapses into a debate about procedure no litigant fully understands.

Tushar Mehta's The Bench, the Bar, and the Bizarre lives in this space between institutional grandeur and human absurdity.

The book doesn't attempt to be a dense scholarly work on jurisprudence.

Mehta says as much himself in the Preface. The Solicitor General of India is interested instead in the eccentric edges of the legal profession - the strange judicial outbursts, the courtroom theatrics, the inflated egos, the accidental comedy, the rituals of reverence and the deeply human flaws that survive beneath ceremonial robes and legal vocabulary.

What emerges is part legal anthropology, part courtroom folklore and part commentary on power dynamics.

The opening chapter, The Divinity Virus, sets the tone almost immediately. Mehta’s theory is simple: if enough people rise every time you enter a room, address you as “Your Lordship” and treat disagreement like a punishable activity, there is always the possibility that a judge may begin mistaking authority for divinity.

Every lawyer knows this ecosystem. The exaggerated deference. The carefully engineered politeness. The strange linguistic acrobatics where advocates do not tell judges they are wrong, but instead apologise for having “failed to assist the Court properly”. The Solicitor captures these professional absurdities with the familiarity of someone who has watched them unfold on a daily basis.

And the humour works because it is restrained. The book does not scream for laughs. It trusts the material.

A judge jails a lawyer for refusing to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. Another compares legal pleadings to crayon scribbles on gravy-stained placemats. One judge apparently believed courtroom management and stand-up comedy were adjacent disciplines. Another challenged a lawyer to a fistfight behind the courtroom.  

Mehta narrates these stories with a straight face for just long enough, before quietly sliding in the knife.

At one point, while discussing narcissistic personality disorder among judges, he observes that the condition resembles body odour: it rarely troubles the person suffering from it, but deeply inconveniences everyone forced to come into contact with them. Any lawyer reading that sentence will almost certainly pause, laugh and then think of at least three people immediately.

That ability - to provoke amusement and recognition simultaneously - runs through the book.

But beneath the wit lies a more serious point. The book is really about power; and the behavioural distortions it produces inside courtrooms. Time and again, Mehta returns to the imbalance built into the legal system: judges can interrupt, admonish, ridicule or intimidate in ways lawyers simply cannot respond to equally. The courtroom is not a conversation between equals; it only occasionally pretends to be one.

The strongest portions of the book are where the humour and institutional critique merge seamlessly. The anecdotes stop becoming mere curiosities and start revealing something larger about legal culture itself - its hierarchies, insecurities, rituals and cultivated pomposity.

The chapters dealing with courtroom decorum move beyond gowns and etiquette and into questions of symbolism and authority. Mehta understands that legal dress codes and ceremonial etiquette are not really about clothing. They are about performance, symbolism and authority.

Similarly, the chapter dealing with artificial intelligence and fake citations captures the modern legal profession with uncomfortable accuracy: lawyers cautiously experimenting with technology they only half trust while courts struggle to decide whether efficiency and hallucination should really arrive in the same package.  

The book moves through disciplinary proceedings, judicial opinions, courtroom transcripts and obscure legal episodes across jurisdictions without sounding weighed down by research. One gets the sense that Mehta genuinely enjoyed excavating these stories from law reports and institutional archives.

Importantly, the book does not descend into bitterness. Many books about the legal profession either romanticise judges into philosopher-kings or treat the institution as irredeemably broken. Mehta does neither. He clearly enjoys exposing absurdity, but there is no sense of contempt for the institution itself. If anything, the criticism comes from someone who still believes that courts matter and, therefore, expects them to behave better.

The prose is conversational and uncluttered. Even the legal discussions remain accessible to non-lawyers because the book avoids turning complexity into performance. There is very little academic self-importance here, which is perhaps why it remains readable even when the subject matter becomes technical.

By the end of The Bench, the Bar, and the Bizarre, one is left with the feeling that the legal profession is not quite the majestic constitutional cathedral lawyers sometimes project outwardly. It is far stranger, far more theatrical, occasionally ridiculous and populated by human beings carrying ego, brilliance, fatigue, insecurity, wit and vanity in unequal proportions.

Which is perhaps exactly why books like this work. They remind lawyers to laugh at their profession before they get lost in its absurdity.