On reading judgments aloud: what oral tradition preserves

There is a habit in our chambers that visitors sometimes find strange. When a judgment matters to a matter in hand — when we mean to build an argument on it, or expect an opponent to — one of us reads it aloud. Not the headnote. Not a summary prepared by a junior. The judgment itself, paragraph by paragraph, while the others listen with the report closed.

The habit is not ours by invention. The law of this subcontinent was an oral tradition long before it was a printed one. Trials are conducted aloud. Arguments before our High Courts and the Supreme Court run for hours, sometimes days, without the written briefing that dominates American practice; the case is made in speech, tested in speech, and often decided in speech, with the order dictated in open court while counsel stand and listen. Even our law of evidence keeps faith with the spoken word. The Qanun-e-Shahadat Order, 1984 — in substance the Evidence Act of 1872 recast — still insists that oral evidence be direct: the witness who heard a thing must come and say what he heard, in his own voice, in the courtroom, where he can be questioned about it.

A tradition older than the reports

Pakistani courtrooms run on speech, and the bar carries a spoken memory. Older advocates quote passages of Asma Jilani v. Government of the Punjab, PLD 1972 SC 139, without opening the report. That judgment, which overruled The State v. Dosso, PLD 1958 SC 533, and refused to treat a usurpation of power as the source of its own legality, has a cadence to it — sentences that stop, turn, and hold their ground. It was written by judges who expected to be read aloud, and who wrote accordingly.

The dissents of Chief Justice A. R. Cornelius are remembered the same way. Dissents have no outcomes; they are remembered for their sound. They read like a man speaking carefully to people who have not yet been born. That is not an accident of style. A judge who writes for the ear writes for the future, because the future will not have the atmosphere of the courtroom to fill in the gaps. The sentence has to carry everything itself.

We do not romanticize any of this. The oral culture of our courts has real costs — the adjournment, the unrecorded submission, the hearing that consumes a week where a page might have done. Those costs are worth naming plainly. But the tradition preserves something that print alone does not. A sentence spoken aloud has to earn its next clause in real time, in front of listeners who can stop it. That discipline is the oldest form of quality control the profession has.

What the ear catches

Reading aloud is a form of audit. The eye forgives; it skims, it fills in, it lets a familiar phrase pass as reasoning. The ear does not skim. Read a weak paragraph aloud and you will hear the passive voice doing its quiet work — decisions that were "arrived at," funds that "came to be transferred," with no actor anywhere in the sentence. In a judgment, that softness marks the place where the court's confidence thinned. In a contract or a board minute, it marks the place where someone preferred not to say who did what. Either way, it is the place to stop and ask questions.

The test we apply to our own drafting is the same test. Would this sentence survive being read aloud in court? A sentence that cannot be spoken in one breath usually contains two claims, and one of them is usually weaker than the other. Splitting them is not a matter of style. It forces the writer to decide whether he is prepared to defend each claim on its own.

Reading judgments aloud also separates the holding from the atmosphere. Headnotes flatten everything into equal-weight propositions. When you hear a full passage instead, you hear where the court committed itself and where it merely observed — where "we hold" gave way to "it appears" or "it may be that." The difference decides what the case can actually be cited for, and it is far easier to hear than to see. It is also the fastest way we know to teach a junior what a ratio is: read the paragraph aloud, close the report, and state in one spoken sentence what the court decided. Vagueness in the retelling reveals vagueness in the understanding, immediately and without mercy.

The habit has a practical edge just now. As of early 2026, a good deal of our constitutional architecture is being re-argued. The Constitution (Twenty-sixth Amendment) Act, 2024 changed how judges are appointed and created constitutional benches within the superior courts, and challenges concerning it remained before the courts at the time of writing [STATUS OF PENDING PROCEEDINGS — TO BE VERIFIED BY REVIEWING LAWYER]. The judgments that eventually settle these questions will be parsed for decades. When they come, we will read them aloud, slowly, and listen for where the court held and where it hedged. That is how we will know what was actually decided, as opposed to what the first day's commentary says was decided.

What this means for you

When your lawyer cites a case to you, ask for the holding in one spoken sentence. If it cannot be said in one sentence, the case probably does not decide what is claimed for it. And before you sign anything that may one day be read in a courtroom — a board minute, a reply to a regulator, a letter written in anger — read the operative parts aloud once. Whatever embarrasses the ear in your office will embarrass you far more in cross-examination. The oral tradition is not nostalgia. It is the cheapest audit you will ever run.