COMMENT Raja Aziz Addruse, for all his ultimate eminence as a lawyer, must have felt himself a marginal man, especially in the last decades before his death on Tuesday from lymphatic cancer at the age of 75.

Nothing exemplified this peripheral stature than the refusal of the Federal Court to grant him consideration when questions on the constitutional monarchy were referred to it in a dispute on the royal succession in Kelantan last year that pitted the former sultan against his successor, the regent...