Dr. Jasvant Modi has spent much of his later career examining the ways in which ancient philosophical traditions might inform modern professional conduct. Among his findings, few concepts strike him as more relevant to the legal field than anekantavada, the Jain doctrine of many-sidedness.
Rooted in centuries of Jain metaphysics, anekantavada holds that reality is too complex for any single vantage point to capture completely, and that genuine understanding requires holding multiple, sometimes contradictory, perspectives at once. For a profession built on argument and advocacy, that idea carries implications far past religious philosophy.
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Anekantavada and the Discipline of Many-Sidedness
The term itself combines “aneka,” meaning many, with “anta,” meaning sides or attributes, producing a doctrine that insists no single claim exhausts the truth of a matter. Jain thinkers developed this construct to guard against dogmatism, teaching that every viewpoint reflects a partial and conditioned understanding.
Applied outside religious contexts, the principle becomes a method of intellectual humility, one that asks practitioners to test their conclusions against alternative readings before settling on a final position. Legal training, by contrast, typically rewards the opposite instinct. Law schools teach students to build a case, defend it rigorously, and resist concessions that might weaken their client’s standing.
Adversarial structure demands conviction, and conviction can quietly harden into tunnel vision. Anekantavada offers a counterweight by strengthening advocacy through a more complete map of the terrain.
Why the Adversarial System Rewards Single Narratives
Common law systems are built around competing stories, and that structure shapes the ways attorneys think long before they enter a courtroom. Judges and juries typically choose between two accounts of the same events, and the adversarial system has long been described as a battle of narratives in which the more persuasive story often prevails over the truer one. Attorneys are trained, sometimes implicitly, to sharpen their narrative and dull the opposing one, a habit that can calcify into genuine blindness toward inconvenient facts.
“Advocacy demands commitment to a client’s position, but commitment should never require pretending the other side has nothing to teach you,” Dr. Modi says. “The strongest arguments are the ones built with full awareness of what could be said against them.”
Awareness, he argues, is precisely what anekantavada cultivates, a disciplined refusal to mistake one’s own vantage point for the whole picture.
Perspective-Taking as a Strategic Advantage
Negotiation scholars at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management found that perspective-taking, which is the deliberate effort to understand a counterpart’s interests and reasoning, produces measurably better negotiated outcomes than empathy alone.
Negotiators who genuinely modeled the other side’s motivations were more likely to uncover creative solutions and secure favorable terms, outperforming those who focused solely on their own position. That finding maps directly onto anekantavada’s practical value in legal work.
An attorney who has rigorously considered the opposing party’s interpretation of the facts is better equipped to anticipate objections, address weaknesses before opposing counsel exploits them, and construct settlement terms that hold up under scrutiny. Multi-sided thinking functions as both an ethical commitment and a tactical asset, sharpening argumentation.
“Anekantavada is often misread as a call for passivity or indecision,” Dr. Modi notes. “It is closer to the opposite. Understanding every angle of a dispute is what allows a lawyer to argue with precision instead of bravado.”
Cognitive Bias and the Limits of Legal Certainty
Modern cognitive science has documented how difficult it is for any professional, however experienced, to recognize bias in their own reasoning. Legal scholarship on the subject describes a persistent pattern in which
cognitive bias distorts legal decision-making by causing practitioners to overweight favorable information and underweight contradictory evidence, commonly without conscious awareness that the distortion is occurring.
Attorneys, judges, and jurors alike are prone to overestimating their own objectivity, a blind spot that anekantavada’s insistence on multiple viewpoints was designed to counteract long before behavioral economics gave it a name. Legal commentators have drawn similar conclusions from unexpected sources, noting that recognizing blind spots in legal judgment requires deliberately incorporating outside perspectives rather than trusting one’s own instincts to self-correct.
“No amount of legal training immunizes a person against their own blind spots,” Dr. Modi says. “Anekantavada does not claim to eliminate bias. It simply insists that the only honest response to bias is to keep inviting other perspectives into the room.”
Dr. Modi views that convergence between Jain philosophy and contemporary psychology as unsurprising. Both traditions, arriving from very different starting points, recognize that certainty untested by alternative viewpoints is prone to calcify into error.
Applying Many-Sidedness to Everyday Legal Practice
Bringing anekantavada into daily practice does not require abandoning advocacy or diluting a client’s interests. Attorneys can incorporate many-sided thinking through structured internal exercises, such as building the opposing counsel’s strongest possible argument before finalizing their own strategy or asking a colleague unfamiliar with the case to challenge their assumptions before a filing deadline.
Mediators and in-house counsel, who are regularly positioned closer to competing interests than litigators do, may find the principle especially natural to adopt, since their work already requires holding several parties’ priorities in view simultaneously. Institutions bear responsibility here as well.
Firms that reward only aggressive certainty in junior associates, without cultivating the discipline of examining opposing viewpoints, risk producing lawyers whose confidence outpaces their accuracy. Dr. Modi suggests that legal education could benefit from explicitly teaching multi-perspectival reasoning alongside traditional case analysis, treating it as a professional skill rather than a philosophical curiosity borrowed from an unfamiliar tradition.
Anekantavada ultimately reframes what it means to argue well. Rather than treating certainty as the goal, the Jain tradition treats humility around the limits of any single vantage point as the foundation of sound judgment, a foundation as useful in a courtroom as it is in a temple. For a profession that prizes decisive conviction, that reframing may be uncomfortable at first, but it points toward a version of advocacy that is demonstrably more effective at anticipating how a dispute will unfold.
Dr. Jasvant Modi is a retired gastroenterologist and longtime supporter of Jain studies. He and his wife, Dr. Meera Modi, helped establish the Tirthankar Shantinath Endowed Professorship in Jain Studies at Rice University.
Disclaimer: This article reflects general commentary on philosophical concepts and is not legal advice. Readers should consult a licensed attorney for guidance on specific legal matters.
