News Type: Event

In this week’s faculty seminar, Apoorv Chaudhary will present his paper titled ‘Disparagement vis-à-vis Social Media Influencers: Balancing Free Commercial Speech with Protecting Consumer Interest’.

Abstract

The ascent of social media influencers has posed new challenges to the brands, where a negative review has the potential to make or break businesses.The interface of the law on disparagement with the reviewers of social media has become a cause for scuffle. On one hand, brands are at risk of losses from false or misleading reviews. On the other hand, the reviewers are facing increasing threats from brands to remove their reviews. This paper attempts to explore this interface with respect to law in India, particularly with regard to freedom of speech and expression. The author argues that the treatment of critical reviews from Indian courts has not been uniform and requires a careful implementation by the courts to balance a mark’s reputation with free speech and consumer interests.

In this week’s faculty seminar, Dr. Sudheesh R.C., will present his paper titled ‘Make Live and Let the Land Question Die: Surplus Populations and the Welfare State’.

Abstract

In a worldwide scenario in which a large number of people are struggling to find gainful work under capitalist relations, welfare programmes have provided a much-needed lifeline. In contexts where these ‘surplus populations’ have been demanding land to address the crisis of reproduction, what implications does their biopolitical inclusion into welfare programmes have for their land question? This article seeks answers to this question through an ethnographic enquiry into state responses to Adivasi land struggles in the caste-ridden society of Kerala, India. A biopolitical regime that ‘makes live’ through welfare programmes may surely be desirable. At the same time, it may ‘let the land question die’ by erasing the demands for land. The implication is that those who were historically dispossessed from the land, such as Kerala’s Adivasis, are divorced from land discursively as well.

The National Law School of India University (NLSIU) is organizing a book talk by Dr. Nandagopal R. Menon on his book ‘Intra-Muslim Polemics in South India: Intimacies, Mass Publicity, and Secularism‘. NLS Faculty Padmini Baruah will be the discussant.

About the book

How do we understand differences and disputes among various branches of Islam? This book places intimacies, rather than radical incompatibilities, at the centre of its in-depth ethnographic account of mass-publicized theological polemics among Sunni Muslims in the south Indian state of Kerala. What unites Muslims of different Sunni groups also divides them and incites polemics—Islam as a shared system of knowledge and practices, bonds of kinship and other social relations, and the common condition of being a beleaguered religious minority in a Hindu majoritarian democracy. Diverging from works that have focused on how Islamic practices like ritual prayers facilitate the fashioning of theologically grounded pious selves, the book argues that intra-Muslim polemics marginalize theology and have little to do with cultivating piety. Instead, polemics constitute inter- and intra-religious socialities, enable Muslims to articulate their connections to India and other imaginaries, and produce Islam as a public religion in a secular nation-state.

About the author

Dr. Nandagopal R. Menon is a post-doctoral research fellow at the Center for Modern Indian Studies (Cemis) of the University of Göttingen. His academic interests include religion, secularism, media and Islamic movements in south Asia. His research has appeared in edited volumes and journals such as History of Religions and Modern Asian Studies.

There will have two presentations in the faculty seminar this week. The first presentation will be by Pranav Verma, followed by a joint paper by Dr. Salmoli Choudhuri and Dr. Moiz Tundawala (Leverhulme ECF at Oxford).

Pranav Verma
Title: Forty-Five Years of Public Interest Litigation in India: Its Changing Constituencies and the Rise of the Regulatory Court

Dr. Salmoli Choudhuri (NLSIU, India) and Dr. Moiz Tundawala (University of Oxford)
Title: Gandhi’s Law of Satyagraha

There will be two presentations by NLS Faculty in this week’s seminar. The first presentation will be by Prof. Arun K. Thiruvengadam, followed by a presentation by Dr. Debangana Chatterjee.

Prof. Arun K. Thiruvengadam
Title: ‘Constitutions  and the Rule of Law in Asia’ (draft encyclopaedia entry for the Oxford Research Encyclopaedia for Politics)

Dr. Debangana Chatterjee
Title:  ‘An Empire of Artificial Intelligence: Exploring an Intersection of Politics, Society and Creativity’ (draft manuscript currently under review by the International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society)

NLSIU will host a special lecture on ‘Gendered Technology: Navigating Law, Data, and Social Justice’ by Dr. Ramona Vijeyarasa from the University of Technology Sydney on July 25, 2024, 5 PM.

Abstract 

Can technology be harnessed for social good? And what is the law’s role when it comes to addressing the gendered harms of new technologies? Set in a context where the world is still over a century away from closing the gender gap, Associate Professor Vijeyarasa will discuss her motivations for going beyond the boundaries of the law to offer new solutions to address gender inequality globally. Drawing from her experiences as the architect of the Gender Legislative Index, she will share her thoughts on why law, technology & data offer new potential to make the world more equal. On the flip side, drawing from her recent research on the gendered harms of artificial intelligence (AI), Dr Vijeyarasa will share emerging good practices on how to regulate and address the biases that underpin AI. She will also share her advice, from her first foray to her most recent experiences using technology for social justice as a ‘data outsider’, as well as her insights on the role of women in data, data science & technology.

About the Speaker

Ramona Vijeyarasa is a legal academic and women’s rights activist. An Associate Professor in the Faculty of Law at University of Technology Sydney (UTS), she is the designer behind the award-winning Gender Legislative Index, a collaboration with Rapido Social and the UTS Connected Intelligence Centre, a tool that uses human evaluators and machine-learning to assess how well laws work for women. Her career began as a corporate lawyer in Sydney. Driven by a passion for human rights, her focus unsurprisingly shifted to international women’s rights law. Ramona’s decade working in civil society has taken her from the slums of Rio de Janeiro, capturing the stories of survivors of domestic violence, to the floating villages of Cambodia, where she supported women’s demands for better access to reproductive health care. As a legal activist, Ramona has helped advance anti-trafficking victim reintegration networks in Vietnam and Ukraine, filed briefs before the European Court of Human Rights, the Supreme Court of Moldova and the Supreme Court of the Philippines and made submissions to United Nations treaty bodies. This rich experience informs her impact-driven approach to research, where sound methodologies are created to deliver tangible change in order to improve lives through the law.

Excerpts from the lecture:

“So as someone who spent many years working overseas, I was really motivated by the fact that gender inequality is a global challenge that has not been resolved in any country in the world. I see the law and technology as coming together to help to create a solution. In short, I wanted to create an index to help measure whether the law was getting it right, to measure whether the law can do better in terms of advancing women’s rights.”

“I started my research on making laws more responsive to women’s rights and after some time I arrived at a point where legal or policy knowledge or solutions I had were not enough. I needed help. I needed to collaborate and started looking to data scientists and software engineers to do that. First I had to actually figure out that they were the people I needed.”

“The end result of my search for collaborators outside of law was a partnership with software engineers at UTS Rapido Social – a low-bono/pro-bono team of engineers in our Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology – and with data analysis and visualisation experts at the UTS Connected Intelligence Centre. I owe them many thanks for believing in my vision for a tool to demonstrate better whether law is playing its part to correct inequality and advance women through the Gender Legislative Index.”

“The Global Legislative Index (GLI) is an interface used to measure how effectively domestic laws respond to women’s needs and interests. It is grounded in international women’s rights but has the capacity to evaluate individual provisions of domestic laws, not just indicate whether or not a law exists. It is powered by a mix of human and machine learning.”