The most important legal mind in the country, who would later chair the Drafting Committee of the Indian Constitution, had no formal standing to argue anything, for a window of weeks in mid-1947. The Echo From Cambridge, MassachusettsNow for my favourite one, because it involves a single private conversation reshaping six decades of jurisprudence, and because almost nobody outside constitutional law seminars has heard of it. “Procedure established by law” instead of “due process of law”. The courthouse doors simply would not open for this category of claim during this category of crisis. But that qualification, I think, makes the exercise more interesting, because it returns us to a question about agency that Indian constitutional history is generally too busy congratulating itself to ask honestly.