With the exception of its 1954 judgment, Yusuf Abdul Aziz, which cursorily upheld the constitutionality of adultery, the Supreme Court did not have occasion to seriously deal with sex discrimination under Article 15(1) in the first three decades after the Constitution....

Today, in a detailed order in the ongoing Aadhar litigation, a three-judge bench of the Supreme Court referred the question of whether there exists a fundamental right to privacy under the Constitution, to a five-judge bench. In its order, the Court...

The decisions of the Kerala High Court in Vijayamma (1978) and A.N. Rajamma (1983), sandwich the Supreme Court’s landmark holding in Air India vs Nargesh Mirza (1981). Nonetheless, in this essay, I will break chronology and discuss the two decisions together, and then turn to Nargesh...

The cases that we have discussed so far have followed a common argumentative pattern. It will be helpful to provide a step-by-step conceptual schema:(1) All these cases are cases of direct discrimination. This means that the distribution of benefits and burdens...

On April 12, 1949, the Governor of East Punjab passed an order directing that in the Jails Deparment, women would be ineligible for appointment to all posts in Men’s jails, apart from that of clerk or matron. In 1972, this...

In the previous essay, we outlined the key questions that arise out of a textual reading of Article 15(1) of the Constitution, which prohibits discrimination “on grounds only of… sex.” In some of earliest cases after the commencement of the...

In this series of essays, we shall discuss sex discrimination under the Indian Constitution. This is an area where there is a significant amount of case law (for an introductory discussion, see Kalpana Kannabiran’s Tools of Justice). But like other other...

(Back in December, the Rajasthan government had introduced an ordinance imposing educational qualifications as pre-requisites for standing for elected office in local government, days before those elections. The ordinance was challenged before the Supreme Court and the Rajasthan High Court,...

The Indian Journal of Law & Technology of the National Law School of India University (NLSIU), Bangalore, in association with the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore is now inviting submissions for its special issue on Net neutrality. Given the...

(In this guest post, Dheeraj K. explores a constitutional controversy around local government elections in Bengaluru)—Recently the Karnataka High Court while dealing with petitions against the inaction of the State government to hold elections to Bengaluru’s urban local body, the Bruhat Bengaluru...

Over the last two weeks, on this blog, we have had an extensive debate about the various aspects of the National Judicial Appointments Case, where the validity of the 99th Amendment and the National Judicial Appointments Commission Act have been...

(In the final substantive essay of our two-week long debate on the NJAC, Professor Sanjay Jain examines the issue of revival from a jurisprudential perspective.A round-up post will follow tomorrow)—The question as to whether the doctrine of revival can be applied...

(What is the Supreme Court finds that the 99th Amendment and the National Judicial Appointments Commission, in their present form, are constitutionally unsatisfactory, but also does not wish to strike them down? In the first part of this guest post, Chintan...

(Rounding off our debate about Article 124C of the Constitution, in this second part of their two-part essay, Ritwika Sharma and Faiza Rahman defend its constitutionality.)—In the first part of our defence of Article 124C, we argued that the said...

(In a two-part series, Ritwika Sharma and Faiza Rahman respond to my essay on Article 124C, arguing that the provision is entirely constitutional)—Among the many contentious issues that engaged the attention of the Supreme Court in the NJAC case was...