News Type: Event

Prof. V.S. Mallar Legal Aid Competition | Aug – Nov 2024

The Centre for Environmental Law, Education, Research and Advocacy (CEERA), NLSIU, along with Symbiosis Law School, (SLS) Pune and the Department of Justice, Ministry of Law and Justice, GoI, is organising the third Prof. V.S. Mallar Memorial Legal Aid Competition, from August – November 2024.

About the Competition

The Prof. V. S. Mallar Memorial Legal Aid Competition is a distinguished four-month event that aims to elevate holistic legal awareness, provide vital legal assistance, and inspire enthusiastic legal activism among law students throughout India.

The success of this competition’s first and second editions serve as a predicament to pave the way for the third edition. This endeavour seeks to empower and enhance the voices of the student bodies nationally to deepen the impact of legal aid and nurture creative campaigns to embark upon yet another memorable journey for empowering all sections of society. In this edition, we introduce yet another significant scope of work, the Legal Assistance Lab – wherein students shall be encouraged to work with advocates at a first-hand level and aid in the dispute resolution process.

The competition shall comprise six core deliverables which shall include:

  • Legal Podcast and FAQs
  • Speed Mentoring
  • Street Play and Jan Sunwaii
  • Reel Making
  • Legal Assistance Lab
  • Final Report

For more details on the competition and the deliverables, please read the brochure.

Awards and Prizes

Winners – Best Legal Aid Clinic – INR 25,000
First Runners Up – Best Legal Aid Clinic –  INR 20,000
Second Runners Up – Best Legal Aid Clinic – INR 15,000
Best Faculty Coordinator award – INR 10,000
Best All India Legal Aid Clinic Student Lawyers – INR 10,000

Who can register for the competition?

The Legal Aid Competition is open to all clubs and legal aid Clinics/committees housed in any institute. We encourage Management, Commerce institutions also to partake in this competition. NSS, NCC, Scouts Units are also encouraged to participate in this competition.

Team Composition

The representatives of the participating institutions for all purposes and for the entire duration of the competition shall comprise the following:

  • 1 Faculty Coordinator/Advisor/NCC/NSS Officer
  • 1 Student Coordinator
  • Maximum of 08 other students, who will formulate the Core Team. Only Core team members will be issued with Certificates
  • Other Students, whose participation may be certified by the Participating Institution

Registration Details

  • The registration fee (inclusive GST) for a team is INR 5,000/- (Rupees Five Thousand Only).
  • Institutions interested in participating in the competition may register by filling in the Google form here.
  • The last date to register has been extended to August 24, 2024.

Faculty Seminar | Make Live and Let the Land Question Die: Surplus Populations and the Welfare State

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.

Book Talk | Intra-Muslim Polemics in South India: Intimacies, Mass Publicity, and Secularism

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.

Faculty Seminar | Presentations by Pranav Verma, Dr. Salmoli Choudhuri and Dr. Moiz Tundawala

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

Faculty Seminar | Presentations by Prof. Arun K. Thiruvengadam and Dr. Debangana Chatterjee

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)

NLS Special Lecture | Gendered Technology: Navigating Law, Data, and Social Justice

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.”

 

11th Annual Conference of the Berkeley Center on Comparative Equality and Anti-Discrimination Law | July 26-28, 2024

The National Law School of India University and the Oxford Human Rights Hub are jointly organizing the 11th Annual Conference of the Berkeley Center on Comparative Equality and Anti-Discrimination Law at the NLSIU campus in Bengaluru from July 26-28, 2024.

The theme of the conference is: Is there Hope for Equality Law?

The conference will feature 32 panels with over 125 participants from over 10 countries on a diverse range of topics around this theme including equality law in the digital age; crime violence and policing; class, poverty, and economic equality; and climate change and equality, amongst others.

The Chief Justice of India and Chancellor of NLSIU, Hon’ble Dr. Justice Dhananjaya Y. Chandrachud will deliver the keynote address.

The conference in Bengaluru builds upon the past success of BCCE’s annual conference which in the past has been held at:

  • Paris (Sciences-Po 2012)
  • California (Berkeley Law 2013)
  • Brussels (Université Libre de Bruxelles 2014)
  • Shanghai (Jiao Tong University 2016)
  • Dublin (Trinity College 2017)
  • Melbourne (Melbourne Law School 2018)
  • Stockholm (University of Stockholm 2019)
  • Cape Town (University of Cape Town 2021)
  • Hong Kong (University of Hong Kong 2022)
  • Netherlands (Utrecht University 2023).

The schedule of the conference for July 2024 is available here.

Note: This event is not open to the public.

Book Discussion | The Right to Be Counted: The Urban Poor and the Politics of Resettlement in Delhi

  1. NLSIU’s Ministry of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation (HUPA) Chair on Urban Poor and the Law is organising a talk on the book ‘The Right to Be Counted: The Urban Poor and the Politics of Resettlement in Delhi‘ by Dr. Sanjeev Routray. The event will take place on July 25, 2024, at the NLSIU Training Centre at 5 pm. The author will be in conversation with Dr. Sushmita Pati and Dr. Anwesha Ghosh.

About the book     

In the last 30 years, Delhi, the capital of India, has displaced over 1.5 million poor people. Resettlement and welfare services are available—but exclusively so, as the city deems much of the population ineligible for civic benefits. The Right to Be Counted examines how Delhi’s urban poor, in an effort to gain visibility from the local state, incrementally stake their claims to a house and life in the city. Contributing to debates about the contradictions of state governmentality and the citizenship projects of the poor in Delhi, this book explores social suffering, logistics, and the logic of political mobilizations that emanate from processes of displacement and resettlement. Sanjeev Routray draws upon fieldwork conducted in various low-income neighborhoods throughout the 2010s to describe the process of claims-making as an attempt by the political community of the poor to assert its existence and numerical strength, and demonstrates how this struggle to be counted constitutes the systematic, protracted, and incremental political process by which the poor claim their substantive entitlements and become entrenched in the city. Analyzing various social, political, and economic relationships, as well as kinship networks and solidarity linkages across the political and social spectrum, this book traces the ways the poor work to gain a foothold in Delhi and establish agency for themselves.

About the Speaker

Dr. Sanjeev Routray is an Assistant Professor in the Institute of Asian Studies, Universiti Brunei Darussalam. He completed his PhD in sociology at the University of British Columbia. Dr. Routray is a sociologist-anthropologist, critical urbanist, and migration specialist of South Asia and beyond. His areas of expertise include urban poverty, political and legal mobilizations, transregional migration, and caste and labor market negotiations. He is the author of The Right to be Counted: The Urban Poor and The Politics of Resettlement in Delhi (2022, Stanford University Press) and his articles have appeared in leading journals including International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Urban Studies, and City: Analysis of Urban Change, Theory, and Action. Dr. Routray has received fellowships from the Urban Studies Foundation (UK), The Foundation for Urban and Regional Studies (UK), Zeit-Stiftung Ebelin und Gerd Bucerius Foundation (Germany), International Development Research Centre (Canada), and the Hari Sharma Foundation for his research and writing.

 

 

NLSIU PACT Conference | Project on Pluralist Agreement and Constitutional Transformation

The National Law School of India University (NLSIU) will host a conference on August 2nd and 3rd, 2024, in Bengaluru as part of the Pluralist Agreement and Constitutional Transformation (PACT) Project.

PACT is an international collaboration, that aims to produce cutting-edge scholarship on India’s constitutional founding, establish a new digital archive on Indian constitution making, and learn from historical and contemporary public engagements with the Constitution. Led by SOAS University of London, PACT collaborators include the Universities of Oxford, York, the Centre for Law and Policy Research, Bengaluru and NLSIU. 

Theme

The conference will explore Indian constitution-making as a process of reaching pluralist agreement between contending actors and constitutional transformation over time, through three lines of enquiry

  • First, what were the types of counter-majoritarian proposals put forward by advocates of individual freedoms and group rights in India between 1928-50? What were the constitutional alternatives offered by those outside the Constituent Assembly?
  • Second, what was the relationship between the procedures adopted in the Indian Constituent Assembly’s deliberations, and its outcomes with regard to pluralism? How did the division of the Assembly’s work into various committees, decision making processes and the timing and sequencing of proposals enable or hinder the accommodation of diversity?
  • Third, what forms of participation and civic engagement are enabled by the extensive constitutional archive available today? In what ways is this archive used to bolster contemporary appeals to constitutional values and principles?

Keynote Speakers 

Hon’ble Mrs. Justice B. V. Nagarathna, Supreme Court of India

Hon’ble Mrs. Justice B V Nagarathna will deliver the conference closing keynote on the topic ‘Home in the Nation: Indian Women’s Constitutional Imaginaries’. This closing keynote address will be delivered on August 3, 2024, 5 PM, at The Falcon’s Den, Prestige Falcon Tower No. 19, Brunton Road. Hon’ble Justice Bangalore Venkataramiah Nagarathna is a Judge of the Supreme Court of India. She served as a Judge of the Karnataka High Court from 2008 to 2021. She is in line to become the first female Chief Justice of India in 2027. The poster for this session can be accessed here.

 

Prof. Pratap Bhanu Mehta

Pratap Bhanu Mehta is the Laurence S. Rockefeller Visiting Professor for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton University. Prof. Pratap Bhanu Mehta will deliver the opening keynote address on August 2, 2024, 9:15 AM, at the NLSIU Training Centre. He was previously Vice-Chancellor of Ashoka University, and President, Centre for Policy Research, Delhi. He has previously taught at Harvard, Ashoka University, Jawaharlal Nehru University and has been Global Faculty at NYU Law School. He has published widely in political theory, history of ideas, Indian constitutional law and politics in India. He is the author of The Burden of Democracy (Penguin 2003) and has produced several edited volumes. He is (most recently) co-editor with Madhav Khosla and Sujit Choudhary of The Oxford Handbook to the Indian Constitution. His forthcoming work looks at philosophical ideas about religion in 20th-century India. The poster for this session can be accessed here.

 

Conference Panels

The conference will comprise 5 panels that will be organised on August 2nd (full day) and August 3rd (first half) at the NLSIU campus.

Day 1: August 2, 2024
Venue: Training Centre, NLSIU

9 am to 9.05 am – Welcome and Introduction | Sudhir Krishnaswamy, NLSIU and Rochana Bajpai, SOAS University London

9.05 am to 10.00 am – Opening Keynote | Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Princeton University

10.15 am to 11.45 – Panel I : Studying India’s Constitutional Founding: Methods and Archives
(Discussant: Sidharth Chauhan, NLSIU)

Paper Presentations:
Quantitative Analysis of Borrowing in the Indian Constitution | Sudhir Krishnaswamy, NLSIU
Our Constitution: The Archive of Constitutional Expectations | Ornit Shani, Haifa University and Rohit De, Yale University
Constitutional Debates in the Indian Journal of Political Science in the 1940s | TT Arvind, York Law School

12.00 to 1.30 pm – Panel II: Key Constitutional Choices: Democracy, Federalism and Social Transformation (Discussant: Karthick Ram Manoharan, NLSIU)

Paper Presentations:
Indian Constitution and Indian Democracy: A Divergent History | Shruti Kapila, Cambridge University, Visiting Professor, NLSIU
India’s Directive Principles: Clarifying Origins and Fate in the Early Republic | Vineeth Krishna, Centre for Law and Policy Research
From Federation to National State: Self, Other and Stranger in the Indian Founding | Moiz Tundawala, Oxford University
Making the Twain Meet: India, Kashmir, and the Constitutionalizing of Difference | Rouf Dar, University of Kashmir

2.30 to 4.30 pm – Panel III: Forgotten Histories of Constitution Making (Discussant: Sanjay Jain, NLSIU)

Paper Presentations:
Implications of Introducing Gender into the History of Constitution-making in India | Achyut Chetan, St Xaviers University
Beyond the Hollow Crown: The Chimeric Constructions of Puddukottai’s Reform Efforts | Bharath Gururaghavendran, New York University
Exclusion of Pasmanda Muslims and Dalit Christians from the Scheduled Caste Quota | Arvind Kumar, Royal Holloway, Universtiy of London (Virtual)
The National Archives and Indian Constitutional History: Perspectives and Experiences | Sarfaraz Hamid, Archival Researcher
The Quill Project: Modelling the Negotiation of the Indian Constitution | Lauren Davis, University of Oxford

Day 2: August 3, 2024
Venue: Conference Panels at Training Centre, NLSIU | Keynote at Prestige Falcon, Brunton Road

9.30 am to 11.00 am – Panel IV: Minority Rights in Indian Constitutionalism
(Moderator: Anwesha Ghosh, NLSIU; Discussant: Salmoli Choudhuri, NLSIU)

Paper Presentations:
Minorities and the Un-making of Indian Democracy | Aparna Chandra, NLSIU
Constitution-Making and the Cultural & Educational Rights of Minorities: The Statement of a New Research Agenda | Adrija Ghosh, Oxford University
Sanatanist Claims to the Constituent Assembly of India | Manas Raturi, Oxford University (Virtual)
A Brief History of the Scheduling Discourse in late-Colonial India (1918-1950) | Saagar Tewari, Jindal Global University
Sieving Silence: The Archive of Indian Constitutional History | Kanika Gauba, Univeristy of Birkbeck (Virtual)

11.15 am to 1.15 pm – Panel V: Deliberative Institutions in Indian Constitutionalism
(Discussant: Aishwarya Birla, NLSIU; Moderator: Megha Sharma, NLSIU)

Paper Presentations:
Rethinking Hegemony through the Indian Constituent Assembly | Rochana Bajpai, SOAS University of London
‘The Indian Parliament: Deliberation and Representation’ | Udit Bhatia, University of York
Parliament and Difference: Parliamentarianism and Development in a Divided Society | Sandipto Dasgupta, The New School for Social Research
The Radical Democratic Party (RDP) and Parliamentary Constitutionalism | Tejas Parasher, University of California, Los Angeles (Virtual)
Quasi-Democratic Imaginations: Envisioning the Parliamentary Opposition in the Constituent Assembly| Rupak Kumar, Vellore Institute of Technology

1.15 pm to 1.30 pm – Closing Remarks and Thanks | Rochana Bajpai and/or Sudhir Krishnaswamy

5.15 pm to 6.30 pm – Closing Keynote | Honourable Justice Nagarathna, Supreme Court of India, Prestige Falcon Towers

Contact

For any queries, reach out to  

Please note: Given the limitations on seating capacity, all panels including the opening keynote address will accom0date guests/attendees on first come, first served, basis. 

 

Faculty Seminar | Hindu majoritarianism and the construction of “religion”

Prof. Nivedita Menon, Centre for Comparative Politics and Political Theory, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, will deliver a special faculty seminar on Hindu majoritarianism and the construction of “religion” on July 10, 2024, at 4 pm. NLS Faculty, Dr. Sushmita Pati will be the discussant.

About the Speaker

Nivedita Menon is a Professor at the Centre for Comparative Politics and Political Theory, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi. Her latest book is Secularism as Misdirection: Critical Thought from the Global South (Permanent Black and Duke University Press 2023). Apart from research papers in Indian and international journals, her previous books are Seeing like a Feminist(2012/updated 2nd Edition 2022), Recovering Subversion: Feminist Politics Beyond the Law (2004); and (co-written) Power and Contestation: India after 1989 (2007/2nd Edition 2014). She is a regular commentator on contemporary issues on the collective blog kafila.online (of which she is one of the founders). She has translated fiction and non-fiction from Hindi and Malayalam into English, and from Malayalam into Hindi, and received the AK Ramanujan Award for translation instituted by Katha.

Abstract

For the session she has shared two chapters from her book Secularism as Misdirection. Critical Thought from the Global South that focuses specifically on India, hoping to draw out implications for wider contexts. Chapter 2 examines ascendant Hindu supremacism as a state project in India, it tries to understand the ways in which the construction of religion functions under conditions of majoritarianism. In addition, three key elements in the co-construction of religion and the state are considered – the Essential Religious Practices test; the idea of religious institutions/deities as juristic persons; and the state’s role in managing the finances of religious institutions.

Chapter 3 focuses on caste, one of the critical elements in this region, which is obscured by the celebration and practice of secularism. This chapter examines the millennia-old project of Brahminism in this territory, now called India, of producing a community that abides by the caste system and accepts Brahminism as the dominant ideology. The modern project of Hindutva is only the current phase of a process that began with the advent of Vedic people Aryans into this land mass. Here she focuses on Hindutva’s  continuity with the millenia old project rather than the breaks. Rejecting the claim of Hindutva that Hindus are the majority in India requires mainstream Left, secular, and feminist politics to reorient itself through a serious engagement seriously with Dalit Bahujan scholarship and life worlds, and to learn from these.