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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Deities’ Rights?, Deepa Das Acevedo
Deities’ Rights?, Deepa Das Acevedo
Faculty Articles
A brief commotion arose during the hearings for one of twenty-first-century India’s most widely discussed legal disputes, when a dynamic young attorney suggested that deities, too, had constitutional rights. The suggestion was not absurd. Like a human being or a corporation, Hindu temple deities can participate in litigation, incur financial obligations, and own property. There was nothing to suggest, said the attorney, that the same deity who enjoyed many of the rights and obligations accorded to human persons could not also lay claim to some of their constitutional freedoms. The lone justice to consider this claim blandly and briefly observed …
Marriage Or License To Rape? A Socio-Legal Analysis Of Marital Rape In India, Vidhik Kumar
Marriage Or License To Rape? A Socio-Legal Analysis Of Marital Rape In India, Vidhik Kumar
Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence
Rape exposes the failure of society’s institutions which were established to provide better security to an individual in a society. These institutions sometimes not only failed to protect an individual from such grave assaults on their autonomy and privacy, but also sanctioned them by either providing them legitimacy by law or not illegitimating them. States often have either provided legal sanctity to rapes within marriage or have refrained from declaring it a crime, on account of it being a private sphere not open to interference. Rape within marriage or marital rape is a global problem, and it is argued that …
The Permanent Liminality Of Pakistan's Northern Areas- The Case Of Gilgit-Baltistan, Hamna Tariq
The Permanent Liminality Of Pakistan's Northern Areas- The Case Of Gilgit-Baltistan, Hamna Tariq
Senior Theses and Projects
Since Pakistan’s inception, Gilgit-Baltistan, a sprawling region in Northern Pakistan, has not been granted provincial status due to its colonial association with the disputed region of Kashmir. Gilgit-Baltistan refutes its forceful integration with Kashmir, an unfortunate remnant of British divide-and-rule strategy, and demands provincial recognition and constitutional rights. Pakistan unfairly claims that it awaits the UN-sanctioned plebiscite in Kashmir to determine the region’s status. However, the likelihood of a plebiscite is little to none, since the Indian government officially annexed Indian-held Kashmir in August 2019, breaching the UN resolution on the plebiscite. A region that has been at the mercy …
Public Interest Litigation & Women’S Rights: Cases From Nepal & India, Jordan E. Stevenson
Public Interest Litigation & Women’S Rights: Cases From Nepal & India, Jordan E. Stevenson
2019 Symposium
As a complex, diverse and dynamic region with diverging, constantly changing constitutional and jurisprudential contexts as well as lasting legacies of patriarchy, South Asia’s traditions of public interest litigation are one of the most well-studied institutions by Western audiences due to their contradictory progressive and innovative nature. Particularly in India, where public interest litigation gives ordinary citizens extraordinary access to the highest courts of justice, questions have been raised as to the effectiveness of public interest litigation as a tool to address gender disparities across the region. Although Supreme Court justices have been a key ally in eliminating legal barriers …
Sovereignty And Social Change In The Wake Of India's Recent Sodomy Cases, Deepa Das Acevedo
Sovereignty And Social Change In The Wake Of India's Recent Sodomy Cases, Deepa Das Acevedo
Faculty Articles
American constitutional law scholars have long questioned whether courts can truly drive social reform, and this uncertainty remains even in the wake of recent landmark decisions affecting the LGBT community. In contrast, court watchers in India—spurred by developments in a special type of legal action developed in the late 1970s known as public interest litigation (PIL)—have only recently begun to question the judiciary’s ability to promote progressive social change. Indian scholarship on this point has veered between despair that PIL cases no longer reliably produce good outcomes for India’s most disadvantaged and optimism that public interest litigation can be returned …
The Constitutionalization Of Indian Private Law, Shyamkrishna Balganesh
The Constitutionalization Of Indian Private Law, Shyamkrishna Balganesh
All Faculty Scholarship
In this Essay, I examine the interaction between Indian constitutional law and Indian tort law. Using the context of the Indian Supreme Court’s dramatic expansion of its fundamental rights jurisprudence over the last three decades, I argue that while the Court’s conscious and systematic effort to transcend the public law/private law divide and incorporate concepts and mechanisms from the latter into the former might have produced a few immediate and highly salient benefits for the public law side of the system, its long terms effects on India’s private law edifice have been devastating. The Court’s fusion of constitutional law and …
Impact Of The “Nirbhaya” Rape Case: Isolated Phenomenon Or Social Change?, Tina P. Lapsia
Impact Of The “Nirbhaya” Rape Case: Isolated Phenomenon Or Social Change?, Tina P. Lapsia
Honors Scholar Theses
In December 2012, a twenty-three year old college student, who was given the pseudonym “Nirbhaya” (“fearless”), was fatally gang-raped on a private bus in Delhi, India, galvanizing the country to swiftly adopt new legislative measures and catapulting the issue of violence against women in India into the international spotlight. Although assault and rape cases have made India infamous for its high volume of crimes against women, the reaction to this particular incident was much different from before. This paper investigates whether the governmental and societal responses represent social change, as indicated by changing attitudes towards violence against women in India. …
Constitutional Fiats: Presidential Legislation In India's Parliamentary Democracy, Shubhankar Dam
Constitutional Fiats: Presidential Legislation In India's Parliamentary Democracy, Shubhankar Dam
Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law
The article presents information on the presidential legislation of the parliamentary democracies, India and Pakistan. It discusses the role of the President acting as the Council of Ministers for the enactment of legislations as ordinances without the consent of the Parliament. Information on the legal interpretation of the ordinances and its interaction with the principles of the parliamentary system of the government is also presented.
Peoples Union For Civil Liberties V Union Of India: Is Indian Democracy Dependent On A Statute?, Shubhankar Dam
Peoples Union For Civil Liberties V Union Of India: Is Indian Democracy Dependent On A Statute?, Shubhankar Dam
Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law
What is the status of a right to vote in the Indian legal system? Is the right a constitutional/fundamental right? Or is it simply a statutory right? Contrary to the decisions of the Supreme Court in the last five decades, this paper argues that the right to vote is a constitutional right: its textual foundation may be located in Article 326. And, in this sense, the Supreme Court has erred in construing the right to vote as a statutory right under the Representation of Peoples Act, 1951. Interpreting the right to vote as a statutory right has larger implications for …