A judge who decides cases must be at a distance from those whose affairs she decides. The distance is not merely physical. It is woven into the design of the constitutional office. When this architecture is breached not from without but from within, through a wife’s posting or a son’s brief, the ‘breach’ is harder to call out.A controversy has arisen around the Madhya Pradesh high court’s judgment of May 15 in the Kamal Maula Masjid–Bhojshala dispute, delivered by a Division Bench of Justices Vijay Kumar Shukla and Alok Awasthi at the Indore Bench. Justice Shukla retires on June 27. The judgment, in a politically charged matter, has been juxtaposed by some commentators with the reported appointment of a near relative of one of the judges as a law officer of the state government. The specific allegation awaits verification. It may yet dissolve on closer examination. Its accuracy or otherwise is not the burden of this argument. But a judiciary whose appearance of independence is held together by the personal scruple of each office-holder is perhaps the most fragile arrangement chosen to ensure judicial independence.India has, for a quarter-century, debated the propriety of post-retirement appointments. The pattern is now familiar. A judge demits office at superannuation and reappears within weeks as a Governor, a tribunal chairperson or a parliamentary nominee. The Bombay Lawyers Association, in its public interest petition of 2023, asked the Supreme Court to mandate a two-year cooling-off period. A Bench of Justices Sanjay Kishan Kaul and Sudhanshu Dhulia dismissed it. The question, the court held, must be left to the conscience of the individual judge or to legislative wisdom. Legislative wisdom has, predictably, not stirred.§That older anxiety may now be overtaken by a newer and graver one. From concerns over post-retirement sinecure to pre-retirement accommodation.In 2022, the Uttar Pradesh government, by an order dated September 21, 2022, included Shreeyash U. Lalit, son of the then Chief Justice of India U.U. Lalit, in its panel of senior advocates in the Supreme Court. Six days later, on September 27, the order was deferred. By all accounts the then CJI had spoken to his son, who promptly withdrew. The episode passed. The underlying logic was unmistakable. A state government had nominated a sitting CJI’s son to argue its cases before the very court the CJI presided over. The propriety question almost answered itself. It was resolved not by the constitutional design but by the discretion of the office-holder.Pre-retirement accommodation is more corrosive than post-retirement, not less. A retired judge has demitted office. Her past judgments are already in the books. The rewards she may receive cannot retrospectively bend them. A sitting judge is still presiding. Her family’s fortunes, a posting or a panel slot or a chamber alliance, overlap in real time with the cases she is hearing. Quid is offered while quo is still pending.The Indian constitution carries no express bar on such transactions. The system on which appointments rest, was designed to absorb the frictions between the judiciary and the executive. The Second, Third and Fourth Judges Cases of 1993, 1998 and 2015 built the collegium to insulate appointments from executive solicitation. The 99th Amendment and the National Judicial Appointments Commission were struck down because the Court held that even a token executive presence in selection compromised judicial primacy. Yet the same vigilance has been thinly directed at the lateral channel by which the executive can reach a sitting judge through her family. The collegium polices the front door. The side door has been left ajar.The defender of restraint will object, fairly, that a judge’s relatives are not the judge. Kinship is not contagion. Children of constitutional office-holders cannot be stripped of livelihood by virtue of their parent’s elevation. The alternative, a dynastic disqualification, would empty the bar of half its talent. It would reproduce, in a different idiom, the very nepotism it claims to cure. The objection is real and it deserves a candid hearing.§It does not, however, dispose of the matter. Judicial impartiality is not only a private virtue of the individual on the Bench. It is a public good consumed by the litigant who appears before her. Lord Hewart’s celebrated dictum in R v. Sussex Justices requires that justice must not only be done but be manifestly and undoubtedly seen to be done. The constitutional question is not whether a particular judge was, in fact, influenced. It is whether a litigant can leave the courtroom persuaded that he received an unprejudiced hearing. He must do so knowing that the judge’s near kin took government briefs during the judge’s tenure. If he cannot, the legitimacy of the judgment, however legally sound, is hit.The structural backdrop of this season makes the question urgent not abstract. On May 16, the President promulgated an ordinance raising the sanctioned strength of the Supreme Court from 33 to 37 judges, excluding the chief justice. The court will now be 38-strong. The ordinance route was chosen weeks after the Budget Session had concluded and weeks before the Monsoon Session would begin. It invites the obvious question. Which retirement clock, and which appointment window, made the wait until July intolerable? Around the same architectural moment, Justice B.V. Nagarathna’s dissenting note on the Pancholi elevation of August 2025 sits in the institutional record. It is a rare acknowledgement that even the collegium’s own internal logic is fraying. The pre-retirement window is now both wider and more important than it has been at any time since the collegium’s birth.The institutional solution for this is not difficult to conceive. The Memorandum of Procedure that governs higher judicial appointments can be amended. It can require disclosure, by every sitting judge of a constitutional court, of all government and government-adjacent appointments held by spouse, children, parents and siblings. The disclosure can be publicly updated. The Advocates Act framework can be extended. A near relative of a sitting judge of a High Court or the Supreme Court should not appear on any government panel of advocates briefed before that court. The bar can be relaxed only by express permission of the Bar Council on recorded reasons. A statutory cooling-off period for retired judges, the very provision the Court refused to mandate in Bombay Lawyers Association v Union of India, can be enacted by Parliament. It should extend forward to cover the final 12 months of a judge’s tenure. None of these reforms requires a constitutional amendment. All of them require political will, which is the one resource the executive will not contribute to its own restraint.A judiciary that lives by the whispered convention of a personal phone call, the mechanism that worked when the side door swung open in 2022, is not yet a judiciary governed by law. It is a judiciary governed by hope.