Law has an ambiguous relationship with honour. The concept of honour is not typically associated with technical–rational legal reasoning, and also sits uneasily with the modern legal emphasis on equality and individual autonomy. However, honour is a fundamental social value that necessarily marks the law’s imagination and informs its speech, and the language of honour is deployed in a variety of legal contexts. In order to explore how the discourse of honour operates within juridical discourse, this paper looks at the Supreme Court of India’s recent directives concerning the playing of the national anthem in cinema halls, in conjunction with some of its comments in cases involving honour killings. The analysis attempts to show how, in both contexts, the Court’s pronouncements reflect the tension between the language of legal reasoning and the language of honour, and how the latter operates in discursive opposition to autonomy and in the service of violence.