In this video clip, judicial reform activist and Rule O’Flaw founder Shivesh Kuksal examines one of the most provocative dimensions of his practice: a deliberately confrontational stance toward judges he believes have engaged in misconduct. What may initially appear to be intemperate courtroom behaviour is, on closer inspection, a carefully calibrated strategy grounded in cognitive science and a precise understanding of how the public interprets judicial disputes.
Kuksal begins by unpacking the cognitive mechanisms that ordinarily shield judicial misconduct from public scrutiny. When judges make wrongful or abusive decisions, a constellation of social norms and cognitive biases tends to produce the default inference that the complaining party is simply a sore loser. This is not because people cannot imagine judicial corruption—they know it occurs. Rather, the human brain is predisposed to favour the simplest available narrative, a phenomenon extensively documented in the cognitive‑science literature. The most parsimonious explanation for a complaint about a judge is that the complainant lost; more complex explanations, no matter how well evidenced, struggle to gain traction against this default.
Kuksal characterises this as a ‘cognitive shield’ that protects judicial authority from scrutiny. The shield operates not through conscious loyalty to the judiciary, but through the brain’s automatic narrative‑processing tendencies. People prefer stories with a clear beginning, middle, and end; they favour explanations that are simple and internally coherent; and they instinctively resist complexity. Operating largely below conscious awareness, these tendencies create a structural advantage for any institution that enjoys a presumption of legitimacy.
Kuksal’s strategy is to introduce an element so conspicuous and so irreconcilable with the default narrative that it disrupts this cognitive shortcut. By openly and aggressively challenging a judge’s integrity to the judge’s face—in a manner that no person confident in the judge’s honesty would tolerate—Kuksal creates a situation that cannot be easily assimilated into the ‘sore loser’ framework. The confrontation itself becomes the most salient feature of the narrative, forcing observers to ask why a rational person would incur such extreme personal and professional risk unless they genuinely believed the judge was acting improperly.
The implications of this analysis for the rule of law are significant. It suggests that judicial accountability is not merely a function of formal oversight mechanisms, but is also constrained by deep cognitive patterns that shape how the public and the legal profession process allegations of misconduct. If the default cognitive response to complaints about judges is to dismiss the complainant, then the formal right to challenge judicial decisions is structurally undermined by the psychology of those who must evaluate the challenge. Kuksal’s approach—however unorthodox—is an attempt to address a problem that conventional mechanisms have manifestly failed to solve: how to make judicial misconduct visible to a public whose cognitive architecture is predisposed to look away.
