Soli Sorabjee Life and Times: An Authorized Biography

by Chandrachud, Abhinav

• ISBN13: 9780143467892
• ISBN10: 0143467891
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2025-07-15
• Publisher: India Penguin

Summary

How does a Parsi lawyer, deeply influenced by the principles of Roman Catholicism, fall in love with a Bahai and go on to become the Attorney General of India for a Hindu nationalist BJP government? How does a boy with a broken leg, who studied in a Gujarati medium school and lost his father at the age of nineteen, go on to mount a heroic defense of the Janata government's decision to dissolve Congress state legislatures in the Supreme Court in 1977? How does a newspaper columnist who admires Nehru, who criticizes the BJP for being 'obsessed' with 'demolishing mosques' and advises them to replace 'Hindutva' with 'Bharatva' or 'Indianness', get chosen by Prime Minister Vajpayee to represent the government in the Supreme Court in many cases including the Ayodhya case? How does a lawyer with a humdrum customs and excise law practice, whose grandfather sold horse-drawn carriages in Bombay, become a U.N. human rights rapporteur, and repeatedly defend the fundamental right to free speech and expression in the Supreme Court of India?

Authorized, comprehensive and absolutely unputdownable, this first biography of Soli Sorabjee opens a window to life and times of India's foremost constitutional experts.

Author Biography

Abhinav Chandrachud is an advocate who practices at the Bombay High Court. He graduated from the LL.M. program at Harvard Law School where he was a Dana Scholar, and from the JSM and JSD programs at Stanford Law School where he was a Franklin Family Scholar. He has worked as an associate attorney at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, a global law firm. He is the author of Republic of Rhetoric: Free Speech and the Constitution of India (2017) and Supreme Whispers: Conversations with Judges of the Supreme Court of India 1980-1989 (2018). He has also written for several leading newspapers in India including The Hindu, Indian Expressand the Times of India, and taught courses at Cornell Law School and NALSAR University of Law.