Shadi Lal was the first Indian Chief Justice of the Lahore High Court, holding the office from 1920 to 1934, which is the longest tenure of any Indian Chief Justice in the colonial period.
He read law at Oxford, practised at Lahore, and sat on the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London, one of very few Indians to do so.
The Lahore High Court under him heard the Bhagat Singh appeals and the Punjab cases of the martial law period's aftermath.
He presided over the trials of the Babbar Akali cases, among others, and his judgments were criticised at the time by nationalist opinion for that.
The Lahore High Court's records for the period cover the Ghadar cases, the Akali morchas, the Babbar Akali cases and the revolutionary trials, and they are in Lahore.
Punjab's legal history in the colonial period is almost entirely unwritten and the archive for it is on the other side of the border.
He was Vice Chancellor of Punjab University at Lahore alongside the judgeship and sat on the body that reorganised legal education in the province. The Lahore bar of his generation produced the judges and the ministers of both successor states, and its roll is a list of names that ended up on two sides of a border.
The courts he presided over were dealing with the land alienation act, the canal colony tenures and the agrarian litigation the settlement system generated, which is most of what a Punjab court did.
His judgments are still cited in Indian and Pakistani property law. He is a Punjabi jurist whose work outlived the province he worked in.