Whose byline is it anyway?

When I opened LinkedIn this week, the Tiger Global International II Holdings judgment was everywhere. Everyone had a view. Everyone had an interpretation. Everyone, it seemed, had read the judgment closely enough to extract nuance, implications, doctrinal shifts and future consequences. The posts were confident, assured, authoritative. Law firm newsletters followed suit, crisp PDFs, firm logos, partner names neatly aligned under headlines promising 'analysis,' 'insight,' and 'key takeaways.'

I read many of these pieces carefully. And there was something oddly identical in the way they were written, in the way the different analyses unfolded.

Not because they were flawed - many were thoughtful and well-argued - but because the process behind them was familiar. Behind several of these institutional voices, there is almost always someone absent from the byline. An intern. A junior associate. A student. Someone who read the judgment line by line late into the night, traced precedents, prepared notes and drafted the first articulation of what would eventually be published as a firm’s 'view.'

This is not an accusation. It is an observation the profession quietly shares.

To acknowledge this is not to diminish learned seniors or stalwarts of the Bar. It bears stating clearly that senior lawyers work under extraordinary pressure, hearings, client responsibility, institutional commitments and reputational weight. Delegation is not only inevitable; it is necessary. Many learned seniors engage deeply with the law, develop independent views and refine arguments with care and experience that only years of practice can bring.

But there is a distinction, a quiet one, between guidance and authorship; between supervision and substitution. And it is in this space, normalised and rarely interrogated, that discomfort begins.

Hierarchy is not the problem. Law has always been hierarchical. Interns learn by researching. Juniors learn by drafting. Seniors correct, contextualise and assume responsibility. That is how legal knowledge is transmitted. What alters the moral texture of this arrangement is what happens when internal labour crosses into the public domain, when intellectual work is circulated under a name that did not produce it, without acknowledgment of those who did.

At that moment, mentorship slips into invisibility.

The Tiger judgment is merely the occasion. Every significant judgment now produces the same choreography: urgency, research, drafts moving upward, edits flowing downward and, finally, publication. What remains visible is the voice. What disappears is the author.

This sits uneasily with the law’s own habits. Legal culture is fastidious about attribution. We footnote obsessively. We cite paragraphs, benches, concurring and dissenting opinions. We debate plagiarism, originality and academic honesty with seriousness bordering on reverence. And yet, within our own professional practices, we accept a system where intellectual labour is routinely detached from the individual who performed it.

This tension is not new. Michel Foucault, in his influential essay What Is an Author?, cautions against treating authorship as a neutral or merely descriptive label. He writes:

“The author's name is not a function of a man' civil status, nor is it fictional; it is situated in the breach, among the discontinuities, which gives rise to new groups of discourse and their singular mode of existence.”

Authorship, Foucault reminds us, is not about vanity. It is about power, about whose labour becomes visible, whose voice is authorised and whose contribution dissolves into institutional anonymity.

The law itself has long rejected the idea that authority floats free of human agency. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr, dissenting in Southern Pacific Co v Jensen, cautioned against mystical understandings of law when he wrote:

“The common law is not a brooding omnipresence in the sky, but the articulate voice of some sovereign or quasi-sovereign that can be identified.”

Law, Holmes insisted, must be traceable. It must be located in identifiable human actors. That insight applies with equal force to legal discourse. Ideas do not emerge spontaneously. They are read, written, argued and revised by people whose labour can and should be named.

Law firm language is careful. It rarely says “I.” It prefers “we believe,” “our view,” “the firm’s position.” The collective smooths hierarchy and presents thought as unified. In doing so, it often obscures the uneven distribution of labour beneath that unity. Because interns and juniors are ambitious, eager and grateful merely to participate, silence becomes customary rather than coerced.

There is also a distinctly performative element to this moment. Posts multiply. Engagement accumulates. Praise circulates. Institutional prestige is reinforced.

Meanwhile, the individual who first engaged deeply with the judgment returns quietly to classes, to examinations, to internships, carrying experience, certainly, but no public recognition of authorship.

None of this is an argument against learned seniors writing or publishing views. Many do so with rigour and distinction. Nor is it a call for dismantling hierarchy. It is simply a reminder that acknowledgment has never injured scholarship. Co-authorship has never weakened authority. Transparency has never diminished respect.

A line acknowledging research assistance, a shared byline, a quiet credit where it is due - these are not radical demands. They merely reflect an honesty the law claims to value. Like many institutional discomforts, this one is easy to dismiss as minor. Compared to constitutional crises or democratic erosion, what is a byline? But institutions are rarely hollowed out by singular ruptures. More often, they are thinned by everyday practices that normalise absence.

What lingers, then, is not anger but unease; the recognition that a profession devoted to justice must also attend to fairness within its own walls.

Because credibility, in the end, is not inherited. It is earned. And recognition, when given honestly, costs very little.

Anubhuti Raje is a final year law student at Gujarat National Law University, Gandhinagar.