2.3.4 Equity, Justice and Good Conscience

• Equity's meaning: the body of principles supplementing or correcting strict law where its rigid application would work injustice — law's conscience. Historically: English equity grew in the Court of Chancery (the Chancellor deciding "according to conscience") alongside the common law courts, with its maxims ("equity follows the law" "he who seeks equity must do equity" "equity acts in personam" "delay defeats equity") and its remedies (injunction, specific performance, trusts) — equity's flexibility defeating law's rigidity, until the two systems fused procedurally (Judicature Acts, 1873–75).• "Justice, equity and good conscience" the famous formula from British-Indian practice — directing courts, where statute and custom were silent, to decide by justice, equity andgood conscience (understood as the principles of natural justice, and in India read as English law's spirit). South Asian legal systems, including Nepal's, inherited the idiom: Nepali courts and the older procedural codes invoke the same gap-filling mandate — where no rule governs,decide by general principles of justice, equity and good conscience. Jurisprudentially, the formula is a standing admission that sources run out — and that adjudication is more than mechanical rule-application (the exact thesis of the sociological and realist schools, Units 3.4 and 3.6).• Nepali illustration: family-law and restitution cases where the courts have crafted remedies by principle where the letter of the statute stopped — equity as the…