Course Description:
The modern understanding of public law corresponds to the areas of law that directly govern relations between citizens and the State. Although it is routinely conflated with practical fields such as Constitutional Law and Administrative Law, the principles of public law have permeated through all conceivable areas of legal theory as well as practice. The borrowing of legal ideas and institutions has been a long-documented practice.  In that sense, the field of ‘Comparative Public Law and Governance’ is focused on the evolution of political and legal institutions across different national jurisdictions and legal traditions, especially in respect of the understanding of rights and ideas of public accountability. With a widening of governmental functions, the presence of the state in newer sectors is also foregrounding a range of novel forums and strategies for ensuring accountability on part of state actors.

This course has been mandated by the University Grants Commission (UGC) to be taught as part of postgraduate law programmes all over India. The intent is to build upon the law graduate’s existing exposure to Indian Constitutional Law and Administrative Law by introducing them to the scholarship that has shaped the evolution of Comparative Public Law as a distinctive discipline, at least since the 1970s. It is hoped that the foundational knowledge provided by this course will equip our postgraduate students to meaningfully pursue comparative modes of inquiry in their writing requirements (research papers, LL.M. Dissertation) as well as in their subsequent scholarly pursuits and professional tasks. The more ambitious goal is to inculcate an intellectual curiosity to learn more the various legal traditions in the world and the disparate ways of thinking about their historical evolution, mutual interaction and application to specific problems of governance.

The focus of this course will be on Constitutionalism in Asia, something which is often neglected in Indian legal education, which tends to focus on jurisdictions in the Global North.  In addition, this course seeks to make students engage with the challenges being confronted by constitutionalism in our contemporary moment, an era that has been variously described as ‘The Age of the Strongman’ or ‘Caesarism.’