A People's Constitution


Book Description

It has long been contended that the Indian Constitution of 1950, a document in English created by elite consensus, has had little influence on India’s greater population. Drawing upon the previously unexplored records of the Supreme Court of India, A People’s Constitution upends this narrative and shows how the Constitution actually transformed the daily lives of citizens in profound and lasting ways. This remarkable legal process was led by individuals on the margins of society, and Rohit De looks at how drinkers, smugglers, petty vendors, butchers, and prostitutes—all despised minorities—shaped the constitutional culture. The Constitution came alive in the popular imagination so much that ordinary people attributed meaning to its existence, took recourse to it, and argued with it. Focusing on the use of constitutional remedies by citizens against new state regulations seeking to reshape the society and economy, De illustrates how laws and policies were frequently undone or renegotiated from below using the state’s own procedures. De examines four important cases that set legal precedents: a Parsi journalist’s contestation of new alcohol prohibition laws, Marwari petty traders’ challenge to the system of commodity control, Muslim butchers’ petition against cow protection laws, and sex workers’ battle to protect their right to practice prostitution. Exploring how the Indian Constitution of 1950 enfranchised the largest population in the world, A People’s Constitution considers the ways that ordinary citizens produced, through litigation, alternative ethical models of citizenship.







The Oxford Handbook of International Human Rights Law


Book Description

The Oxford Handbook of International Human Rights Law provides an authoritative and original overview of one of the key branches of international law. Forty contributors comprehensively analyse the role of human rights in international law from a global perspective, examining its origins and principles, and measuring its impact on the world.







Gender, Alterity and Human Rights


Book Description

Human rights are axiomatic with liberal freedom. Yet more rights for women, sexual and religious minorities, has had disempowering and exclusionary effects. Revisiting campaigns for same-sex marriage, violence against women, and Islamic veil bans, Gender, Alterity and Human Rights lays bare how human rights emerge as a project of containment and unfreedom rather than meaningful freedom. Kapur provocatively argues that the futurity of human rights rests in turning away from liberal freedom ­and towards non-liberal registers of freedom.




Suspects’ Rights in India


Book Description

This book examines the procedural, cultural, and institutional framework of custodial interrogation in India. It explores theoretical and practical perspectives on custodial interrogation practices in India which have been in urgent need for reform and critiques the systemic failure on the part of the police in India to implement suspects’ rights uniformly. This volume, — Analyses the Indian framework of custodial interrogation to identify its fundamental flaws, and emphasises on the need for having a lawyer present during custodial interrogation; — Demonstrates significant evidence on state of suspects’ rights in India through comparative law methodologies with a focus on common law scholarship and jurisprudence, more particularly England and Wales, and supplemented by vital empirical research through key interviews with related institutional parties; — Discusses emerging, seminal jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights on applications of the right to fair trial at the custodial interrogation stage, especially shedding light on modern applications of the right to legal assistance in England and Wales, and radical Strasbourg-inspired reforms in other European jurisdictions; — Highlights the right to legal assistance as one of the viable solutions to break the culture of police lawlessness at this critical stage of the criminal process. An invigorating study, this book is aimed at enriching data and hypothesis for academics, policy makers, civil society organizations, and students working in the area of law and legal studies, police and policing, citizenship, and political science.




The Indian Legal Profession in the Age of Globalization


Book Description

This book provides the first comprehensive analysis of the impact of globalization on the Indian legal profession. Employing a range of original data from twenty empirical studies, the book details the emergence of a new corporate legal sector in India including large and sophisticated law firms and in-house legal departments, as well as legal process outsourcing companies. As the book's authors document, this new corporate legal sector is reshaping other parts of the Indian legal profession, including legal education, the development of pro bono and corporate social responsibility, the regulation of legal services, and gender, communal, and professional hierarchies with the bar. Taken as a whole, the book will be of interest to academics, lawyers, and policymakers interested in the critical role that a rapidly globalizing legal profession is playing in the legal, political, and economic development of important emerging economies like India, and how these countries are integrating into the institutions of global governance and the overall global market for legal services.




Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice


Book Description

(unseen), $12.95. Donnelly explicates and defends an account of human rights as universal rights. Considering the competing claims of the universality, particularity, and relativity of human rights, he argues that the historical contingency and particularity of human rights is completely compatible with a conception of human rights as universal moral rights, and thus does not require the acceptance of claims of cultural relativism. The book moves between theoretical argument and historical practice. Rigorous and tightly-reasoned, material and perspectives from many disciplines are incorporated. Paper edition Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR