Justice On Sale
In Justice on Sale, Advocate Yogesh Sethi performs a rare act of professional rebellion — he turns the mirror inward. His book examines the Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) system not as a triumph of modern legal reform, but as a graveyard of broken promises where the ideals of access and fairness have been quietly buried under paperwork, quotas, and political patronage.
Structured like a legal argument, the book moves from introduction to indictment. Chapters such as Fake Figures and The Number Game expose how inflated statistics from Lok Adalats create the illusion of efficiency, while Distinctive Mindset and Played by the Legal System humanize the fallout — ordinary citizens coerced into settlements that deny them true justice. The prose is crisp, the tone forensic, and the evidence irrefutable. Sethi cites constitutional amendments, judicial precedents, and institutional directives to show how the pursuit of “performance” has replaced the pursuit of justice.
What elevates the book is its moral courage. Sethi does not spare his peers or his own profession. He questions the ethics of retired judges occupying lucrative ADR posts — calling it “post-retirement promise” — and challenges the judiciary’s quiet complicity in upholding a façade of progress. His writing is deeply personal yet rooted in rigorous legal analysis. The recurring motif of “compromise” — not as resolution but as surrender — encapsulates the emotional cost borne by litigants who are forced to settle just to escape harassment.
Stylistically, Sethi’s prose is direct but laced with literary flair. Quotations from Chinua Achebe and Swami Vivekananda give philosophical weight to his argument, while case studies ground it in reality. The result is a hybrid work — part legal commentary, part moral treatise. It reminds one of P. Sainath’s Everybody Loves a Good Drought — not in theme, but in its courage to expose institutional hypocrisy through lived truths.
If the book falters, it is only in its uniform tone of despair. There are few moments of hope or reform-oriented direction. The reader is left convinced of the system’s failures but uncertain of the path forward. Still, perhaps that is Sethi’s point — that the first step toward reform is outrage.
Justice on Sale is not for casual readers. It demands intellectual engagement and moral introspection. For lawyers, students, and judges, it is a painful but necessary read — a reminder that justice cannot be “disposed of” like a file on a bureaucrat’s desk.
Verdict: A fearless insider’s chronicle that exposes the corrosion of conscience in India’s justice system.
Title: Justice On Sale
Author: Adv. Yogesh Sethi
Publisher: Evincepub Publishing
