M. K. Nambyar Collection

Meloth Krishnan Nambyar (1898–1975) was one of India's most consequential constitutional lawyers, born in Kanhagad, in what is now the Kasargod district of Kerala. He graduated in law from Mangalore and, in the early 1930s, completed an LL.M in Constitutional and Administrative Law from the London School of Economics, in which he stood first. Back in India, he served as Public Prosecutor and Government Pleader in Mangalore for eleven years before shifting to Madras, where he took over the practice of P. Govinda Menon upon the latter's elevation to the High Court Bench. His work was largely focused on criminal law, but he had been reading and writing on constitutional law for years.

It was V.G. Rao, lead counsel for the communist leader A.K. Gopalan, who first noticed Nambyar weaving constitutional principles into a criminal defence. Rao asked him to take the Gopalan matter to the Supreme Court, a challenge to the Preventive Detention Act and the first constitutional case of seminal importance before the new apex court. In 1950, Nambyar argued that Article 21's phrase "procedure established by law" should incorporate natural justice and due process, that preventive detention laws could be tested against Article 19, and that fundamental rights were not mutually exclusive. The majority rejected these arguments, though he did succeed in getting Section 14 of the Act struck down. It took nearly three decades, but Nambyar's positions were eventually accepted in the Bank Nationalisation case of 1970 and decisively in Maneka Gandhi's case in 1978, becoming the law of the land.

His most far-reaching contribution came in I.C Golaknath v. State of Punjab in 1967, where he argued that implied limitations on Parliament's amending power prevented it from destroying the Constitution's essential features, an idea he had encountered in the work of German jurist Dieter Conrad. The argument was not accepted then, but in Kesavananda Bharati in 1973, a thirteen-judge bench accepted the basic structure doctrine by a majority of seven to six. By then Nambyar, in failing health, could not appear in the case. He had also appeared before the Privy Council as early as 1933, and commanded a large practice at the Madras High Court, particularly in road transport nationalisation matters. His son K.K. Venugopal, who would himself become Attorney-General, recalled that his father was deeply disturbed by the Emergency declared in June 1975. Too weak to campaign against it, Nambyar died on 18 December 1975, before he could see it lifted.