Prudence is different from knowledge: CJI

Kolkata, Jan 18 (PTI) Chief Justice of India Justice Surya Kant on Sunday said that prudence is different from knowledge, maintaining that it is knowing when to insist on the letter of the law and when to understand the purpose it seeks to serve.

Addressing the convocation of the West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences (NUJS) Kolkata, of which he is the Chancellor, the CJI said that knowledge can be acquired quickly from books, maybe classroom and training, but what follows thereafter is shaped far more slowly, often imperfectly, through experience, error and sustained reflection.

"Prudence is knowing when to speak and when silence carries greater weight," he said.

"It is knowing when to insist on the letter of the law and when to understand the purpose it seeks to serve," he said at the convocation, being held after a gap of four years.

Graduate and postgraduate pass-outs were all given their degrees at the convocation, which was attended by Supreme Court justices Dipankar Dutta and Joymalya Bagchi and Calcutta High Court Chief Justice Sujoy Paul.

"We live in an age of immediacy where opinions are formed instantly, and responses are expected without waiting," the CJI said.

He said that in such a world, judiciousness has become rare and therefore "deeply valuable".

The CJI said that where efficiency competes with fairness, where professional success measured in numbers feels strangely hollow, "in those moments, rules alone will not guide you, your prudence will".

He said that the legal profession is not merely intellectually demanding, it is emotionally and psychologically exacting, maintaining that it expects stamina, it rewards availability, and it quietly normalises long hours and compressed timelines.

Drawing from his decades of experience, the CJI said, "the ability to unwind and to slow down at the right intervals is not a retreat from professional responsibility, rather it is a way of sustaining it.

Noting that this convocation has taken its time in arriving, he said that perhaps it is simply right on time.

"The law may not always resemble what you studied here, files may be heavier than textbooks, timelines tighter than academic calendars and outcomes far less predictable than classroom debates had suggested," he said.

The CJI said that legal education at its best is not about providing ready solutions, but it is about shaping how one thinks when solutions are unclear.

"It gives you the ability to remain steady when facts are uncomfortable, when interests collide and when each conclusion feels inadequate," he said.

"That capacity does not disappear when you leave the university, it ripens as experience tests it," the CJI said, exhorting the graduate and the postgraduate passouts. PTI AMR RG