The woman rewriting the rules

Her parents named her Sapana not as a wish for her future but as a marker of their disappointment. Two daughters had already arrived in the family before her, in the village of Ramgram in Nawalparasi. By the time her mother carried a third child, the family had convinced itself that the longed-for son was finally coming. When he was not, when she was not him, they gave her the name that means the thing you want and cannot have: dream, or Sapana. Sapana Pradhan Malla grew up knowing this. She has always seemed to find it funny, in the particular way that people find funny the things that drive them. “That’s probably why my whole nature is a boy’s,” she said in a recent interview at her home. “I always made my gang with the boys.” Malla is now the acting Chief Justice of Nepal's Supreme Court — the most senior judge in a country whose legal system she spent 30 years trying to reform from the outside before she was finally invited inside. The appointment came, as these things often do in Nepal, through a constitutional mechanism that is both precise and contingent: when Chief Justice Prakash Man Singh Raut retired, seniority dictated that the next in line assume the role of ka.mu., or acting, chief justice. If the tradition of appointing the most senior justice holds, Malla is the next in line. The formal process — a recommendation from the Constitutional Council, a parliamentary hearing, a presidential oath — remains incomplete, delayed by the council's unfinished compositio