(In this guest post, Aratrika Choudhuri, a student at the National University of Juridical Sciences, Kolkata, discusses the recent discussion of the Pakistani Supreme Court on the basic structure doctrine) — The Supreme Court of Pakistan (“SCP”), by an overwhelming majority of 13 out of 17 judges, r...
Blogs by Gautam Bhatia
The Indian Constitution’s religious freedom clauses (Articles 25 and 26) constitute an extremely complex web of relationships between individual, community and State. To navigate this web, the Courts have developed two broad doctrinal tools: a distinction between the religious and the secular, and t...
January 26, 2016 · 12:25 pm The Centre for Law and Policy Research has developed a website for searching the Constituent Assembly Debates. So far, researchers have been using Vivek Srinivasan’s fantastic search engine for our research, which has been a truly invaluable resource. The CLPR website, ho...
Priya Ravinchandran has started a new blog called Women Architects of the Indian Republic , which aims to document the contributions of women members of the Indian Constituent Assembly, to the Debates and the Framing. It promises to be a fascinating enterprise. First published here. Original author:...
(In this guest post, Vikram Hegde, a Delhi-based Supreme Court lawyer, discusses how Section 66A of the IT Act, which was struck down by the Supreme Court in Shreya Singhal’s Case, nonetheless continues to exist insofar as non-citizens are concerned) — For those who happened to have been living unde...
(Previously on this blog, we have looked at the intersection between the Constitution, and criminal procedure. In this guest post, Abhinav Sekhri examines how the Official Secrets Act is constitutionally suspect by enabling the possibility of retrospective creation of offences. The post first appear...
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...
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 &#...
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...
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...