Courts are the cornerstone of an ordered society. Legislature legislates or enacts law and statutes are the edict of the legislature. Courts implement those edicts through interpretation. Legislature lays down the general principles. Judiciary applies those principles in concrete cases. From the earliest Vedic ages, India has had a recorded legal history. In fact, a civil legal system might well have been in existence in the Bronze Age and in the Indus Valley civilization. India was always governed by laws as laid down in the Arthashastra way back in 400 BC and then later in 100 AD in the Manusmriti. The Vedas, Upanishads and other religious books of the Hindus, Jains and Buddhists put laws in place in ancient India, so the Indians of these times were already exposed to the idea of living under the law. The first major case of judicial activism through social action litigation was the Bihar under trials case. In 1980 in came in the form of a writ petition under Article 21 by some professions of law revealing the barbaric conditions of detention in the Agra protective Home, followed by a case against Delhi women's Home field by a Delhi law faculty student and a social worker. Judicial activism is not an aberration. It is an essential aspect of the dynamics of a constitutional court. It is a counter-majoritarian check on democracy. Judicial activism, however, does not mean governance by the judiciary. Judicial activism must also function within the limits of the judicial process. Within those limits, it performs the function of stigmatizing, as well as legitimizing, the actions of the other bodies of government – more often legitimizing than stigmatizing.