The language of justice
Meet Bhumika Billa: the legal scholar with the eye of a poet.
To generate meaning, our languages rely on shared rules. But rules are not neutral: they set boundaries, limit what can be expressed, and shape our thoughts.
When it comes to the language of the law, these rules set the path of people’s lives. Legal definitions determine what is valuable, who can access justice, and who is excluded.
In translating our world into ‘legalese’, the legal system aims at consistency and precision – producing texts that leave the average person bemused by jargon and specialist terms.
Who gets to be a translator between justice and the people? Can the general public participate in that translation? And what should our legal systems strive toward?
The limits of language
Bhumika Billa wants to see a legal world optimised for inclusion, justice and fairness.
She’s a Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Cambridge International scholar with a poet’s love of language. As a PhD candidate and Research Associate at the Centre for Business Research, she spends most of her time in the Faculty of Law.
Bhumika qualified as a lawyer in Delhi, then researched for the Indian government before coming to Cambridge.
“My first love was literature and poetry,” Bhumika says. “I channelled that passion into my study of law. I want to know how language shapes people, power, and societies.”
Bhumika likes being the only lawyer in conferences on philosophy or storytelling, and the only poet in conferences on law. She translates her research into creative modes, including poetry, dance, animation and films.
Her latest short on women lawyers made headlines in the Indian press and inspired a debate with a former judge of the Supreme Court.
Bhumika performing at Unislam.
Bhumika performing at Unislam.
“Legal language makes meanings that are exclusive. It serves the interests of a certain few at the cost of many others.”
Bhumika Billa
The letter of the law
“Currently, legal language makes meanings that are exclusive,” says Bhumika. “It serves the interests of a certain few at the cost of many others.”
Bhumika finds inspiration in an unlikely source: Claude Shannon’s information theory, originally developed for maths and computer science.
Shannon realised that any communication seeks to limit the possibilities of error, while passing through many layers of noise. His insights underpin the modern information age, where we efficiently compress huge amounts of data into smaller packages that can be reliably reconstructed by whoever receives them.
According to Shannon, we can improve our communication systems by better preserving message accuracy and optimising the efficiency of the transfer.
Bhumika modifies these goals when applying them to the legal system. Where Shannon prized efficiency, Bhumika prioritises fairness. In the legal world, it’s not enough for information to be streamlined – it has to be just.
She’s confident that Shannon’s ideas can reveal the law’s inner workings. They can show us how information flows through the legal system: who gets to decide what is information and what is noise.
A schematic diagram of Shannon’s model of communication, as taken from his paper: A Mathematical Theory of Communication (1948).
A schematic diagram of Shannon’s model of communication, as taken from his paper: A Mathematical Theory of Communication (1948).
Last year, Bhumika’s paper ‘Law as Code’ won the Gavin C. Reid Prize for the Best Paper by an Early Career Researcher.
The law ‘codes’ the screen you read this on as ‘moveable property’. The content of Bhumika’s paper becomes ‘intellectual property’, its author a ‘legal subject’.
“In classifying information, we always leave something out,” Bhumika says. To redesign our legal systems for people instead of power, “we need to adapt our legal language to include information that has been excluded.”
Why does the law translate our societies into its own language?
“Partly, it’s to define rules that are consistent across many contexts and enable coordination. Legal language makes things specific and predictable. Translation happens in many places: in parliaments, in courtrooms, in the newspapers. At every stage, the people making that translation – legislators, judges, lawyers, police officers, journalists – are prey to bias.”
Bhumika implores these different nodes in the legal system to talk to one another. She wants to see a world where legal experts draw on the latest research and data to make more inclusive meanings.
One model for this interconnected world is Cambridge’s Centre for Business Research. Here, lawyers, economists and journalists work on pressing issues, like the effect of artificial intelligence on legal systems.
Elsewhere in Cambridge, other researchers are interrogating the language of our legal system. Bhumika’s supervisor Professor Simon Deakin also writes on how the law evolves, while her fellow scholar Dr Ira Chadha-Sridhar argues that vagueness can actually help us in more inclusive legal interpretations.
How do legal systems treat women?
After witnessing legal systems in two continents, Bhumika couldn’t ignore female lawyers’ shocking experiences of inequality. Only 15% of India’s practising lawyers are women, while women hold only 18% of partner positions in the UK’s top law firms.
Bhumika’s film (In)visible, funded by Cambridge Creative Encounters, is a poetic response to this issue. Viewers hear testimonies from female lawyers who have faced injustice in their professional lives, alongside expressive poetry and dance.
Bhumika interviewed lawyers, bureaucrats and judges to learn about their experiences of legal translation.
“It was astonishing how many interviewees brought up gender inequality. These women felt excluded, marginalised, or erased. These are real cases where the law is reinforcing power gaps and inequalities.”
In October 2024, the Society for Democratic Rights screened the film to celebrate 100 years of women being able to practice law. The UK marked the occasion just a few years earlier, with centenary celebrations in 2019.
Together with former Indian Supreme Court judge Justice Hima Kohli and an expert panel, Bhumika stressed that the legal profession needs to be inclusive for women of all castes and religious backgrounds.
“The panel sparked discussions about merit and quotas – whether we need to reserve seats in the judiciary for women, for example, to ensure equality.”
Bhumika at the Delhi launch of the (In)visible film.
Bhumika at the Delhi launch of the (In)visible film.
The film has been screened at venues across the UK and India, inspiring conversations across national media. It’s a timely example of how creative responses can capture new forms of information for researchers, and make findings accessible to a wider audience.
A creative mind makes unexpected connections between disparate areas of knowledge. In building bridges between computer science and law, between poetry and jurisprudence, and between Delhi and Cambridge, Bhumika is rewriting our definitions of what a legal scholar can be.
Published on 18 June 2025.
The text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
