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...

(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...

(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 –...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

(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...

(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...

(In an upcoming series of guest posts, Karan Lahiri argues that, properly interpreted, Article 16 of the Constitution not only permits, but actually casts an affirmative duty upon the State to ensure the adequate representation of backward classes of citizens in...

Previously on this blog, we have discussed in detail the pending constitutional challenge to the Haryana Panchayati Raj Act, which imposes educational, property and debt-based disqualifications upon candidature in local government elections. Part of the argument has focussed upon the...

November 9, 2015 · 8:22 pm Previously on this blog, we have discussed the doctrine of unconstitutional conditions (government may not make the grant of a privilege conditional upon the relinquishment of a fundamental right, even though there is no...