January 17, 2016 · 4:59 am Tomorrow, the Supreme Court will hear final arguments on the question of whether women between the ages of 10 and 50 can be excluded from the Sabrimala shrine – an issue that has gained a degree of notoriety in the last week. On the constitutional question, I think the arg...
Constitutional Law
Part I Buildup to Bharati This year marks an unlikely milestone in the history of India’s judiciary. It is the 40th anniversary of both the Emergency and of the review petition that sought to overturn the most famous case in India’s judicial and constitutional history: Kesavananda Bharati vs State o...
On July 1, 1983, Justice P.A. Choudary of the Andhra Pradesh High Court struck down Section 9 of the Hindu Marriage Act, which allowed the Court to pass an order for ‘restitution of conjugal rights.’ In simple language, if the Court was convinced that either a husband or a wife had ‘without reasonab...
(This is a guest post by Karan Lahiri and Vrinda Bhandari. A condensed version of this piece appeared previously on Scroll .) As a bleak year drew to a close, the Supreme Court delivered another distinctly underwhelming judgment, in The Kerala Bar Hotels Association & Anr. v. State of Kerala &#...
A terrifying judgment from a High Court in a corruption case! Supreme Court advocate, K.V.Dhananjay points to a recent judgment of the Karnataka High Court that altogether quashed a corruption trial involving former Chief Minister of Karnataka, B.S.Yedyurappa (BJP) and current Energy Minister of Kar...
January 10, 2016 · 4:03 pm The Dawoodi Bohra case, which we discussed in the last essay, has been taken off the supplementary list for tomorrow. Hopefully, it will not take eleven years for it to be listed a second time! In the meantime, I came across this quotation by the liberal political theorist...
On Monday, the 11th of January, a Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court will begin hearing the case of Central Board of the Dawoodi Bohra Committee v State of Maharashtra. This is a case that could potentially have important ramifications for religious freedom under the Constitution, and the inter...
(In this guest post, Suhrith Parthasarathy, a Madras-based lawyer, discusses the recent Supreme Court decision on Archakas and Agamas) — Previously, in a three-part essay published on this blog, I had previewed a case concerning the appointment of archakas (priests) to Tamil Nadu’s temples which bro...
(Disclaimer: I should state at the outset that I have had two papers rejected by the International Journal of Constitutional Law, and entirely correctly: the first time was when I submitted an individual article as a third-year law student – naturally, it was of terrible quality; the second was a pa...
The Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code, 2015 was introduced in Lok Sabha yesterday, as a Money Bill. In this context, we briefly outline the various types of Bills in Parliament, and highlight the key differences between Money Bills and Financial Bills. What are the different types of Bills? There are f...
The Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Bill, 2015 is currently pending in Rajya Sabha and was listed for passage in the current Winter session of Parliament. The Bill was passed by Lok Sabha after incorporating certain amendments, in May 2015. Here is all you need to know about the B...
On this blog, we have extensively covered discrimination law jurisprudence in India. For people interested in the field, and based in Delhi, there is an event tomorrow that promises to be hugely interesting. The Centre For Policy Research is organising a workshop on a draft anti-discrimination bill,...
Krupakar Manukonda has drawn my attention to an interesting Supreme Court judgment handed down yesterday. In Dr. Janet Jeyapaul v SRM University , the question was whether a writ petition was maintainable against the SRM University, which is a “deemed University” within the meaning of S. 3 of the UG...
December 14, 2015 · 8:34 am On the SpicyIP blog, Thomas J. Vallianeth has a response to my previous short piece, pointing out plagiarism in some of the Supreme Court’s important constitutional judgments. Thomas writes: “Gautam in his piece suggests that un-originality in judgements is a consequence ...
This morning, the Supreme Court upheld the Haryana Panchayati Raj Act amendments, which imposed educational, debt and property-based restrictions upon the right to contest Panchayat elections. On this blog, we have argued in detail that the Act was unconstitutional, and ought to have struck down (al...
On December 1, the Spicy IP blog reported that a Division Bench of the Delhi High Court had plagiarised thirty-three paragraphs of its judgement in Roche v Cipla from a law review article written by Shwetasree Majumder and Eashan Ghosh in the Queen Mary Journal of Intellectual Property. In an order ...
December 4, 2015 · 3:23 pm So far, I have managed to refrain from using this blog as a personal platform, but I will depart from that principle this one time. My book, Offend, Shock, or Disturb: Free Speech under the Indian Constitution, has just been published by Oxford University Press. The book m...
November 25, 2015 · 2:29 pm The United Kingdom courts have handed down two judgments today that seem to deal with interesting issues. In Public Law Project v The Lord Chancellor , a unanimous Court of Appeal held that a residence-based test for qualifying for legal aid does not amount to illegal dis...
(In this guest post, Rohan Kothari, who represented one of the interveners before the Supreme Court in the recently concluded hearings on the constitutionality of the Haryana Panchayati Raj Act, discusses the tangled history of the jurisprudence on the right to stand for elections) — Oral arguments ...
(In Part II of this series, Karan Lahiri continues his argument about the interpretation of Article 16 of the Constitution) — In the last post , I introduced the concept of “power coupled with duty”. In this part, I talk about a batch of writ petitions pending before the Supreme Court, emerging from...