MAYBE this is a good time to recall the Reko Diq judgment delivered by one of the most exalted and hailed chief justices of the Supreme Court. Or should we recall the Dam Fund instead, along with threats to charge with treason those who dared to criticise the effort?

Remember that fiasco, run by a chief justice who probably relished the limelight more than any of his predecessors? Or maybe an article detailing a blow-by-blow account of how yet another chief justice became obsessed with tearing down a residential building on Sharea Faisal in Karachi, leaving the families who lived in it homeless and fighting to this day for compensation? How many remember how the same CJ who promised us that he would build a mega dam with funds donated by the public also became obsessed with shutting down the Punjab Kidney Liver Institute?

How many of us know what it takes to bring in mega investment in a mining project, or erect a large hospital providing specialised care for free, or how infrastructure financing actually works, or the process of compensating displaced affectees of government decisions is actually structured? How many of us realise how long this list of the follies and silliness of the post-lawyers’ movement judges actually gets?

I have lawyer friends who shrug this history off as if it is all par for the course, or nothing but a series of isolated moments during which some judges temporarily showed bad judgment. But I have a different reading. These are moments when the truth about the so-called........

© Dawn