This week’s faculty seminar will be held on 9 August, 2023. Prof. Nanditta Batra will be presenting a paper titled ‘Bail on Medical Grounds in India: A Search for Principled Jurisprudence’. Prof. Nagaratna will be the discussant.
Abstract
The law creates a leeway for sick and infirm persons to obtain bail in otherwise hard cases due to their vulnerable position. However, the provision of obtaining bail on medical grounds has been under immense public scrutiny as it has been often observed that the accused with political patronage find it a convenient route to regain their liberty while others continue to languish in jail despite their precarious health conditions. Such a situation is an enigma to ‘Rule of Law’. In order to understand whether such an anomaly actually exists and the reasons for such anomaly, if any, I attempt to first systematically sketch the basic principles of law that the Courts must adhere to in adjudicating bail cases on medical grounds. I then map the actual practices of the Indian Courts and the degree of coherence in following a particular principle by empirically examining the data from cases decided between January2020 to August 2023.
This week’s faculty seminar will be held on 2 August, 2023. Prof (Dr.) Nigam Nuggehalli will be discussing about the topic titled ‘Tax Avoidance in Indian Tax Treaties: The Past, the Present and the Future’.
Abstract
Extract from the ‘Introduction’: “This chapter discusses the nature of tax avoidance with reference to Indian tax treaty provisions and various measures, legislative and judicial, undertaken to engage with such tax avoidance. A particular focus of the chapter is on broad spectrum anti-avoidance rules, popularly known as General Anti-Avoidance Rules in the domestic context and the Principal Purpose clause (the PPT clause) in the context of tax treaties.”
Our next public lecture will take place on 3rd August 2023. Our guest speaker is Prof. Ruth Vanita who will be delivering a talk titled “Translating Gender and Sexuality”.
About the Speaker:
Ruth Vanita is the author, most recently, of two novels, Memory of Light (Penguin 2022) and A Slight Angle (forthcoming Penguin 2024) and The Broken Rainbow: Poems and Translations (Copper Coin 2023). Her books include The Dharma of Justice in the Sanskrit Epics: Debates on Gender, Varna and Species (Oxford University Press, 2022) Love’s Rite: Same-Sex Marriages in Modern India (Penguin 2005; 2023); Gender, Sex and the City: Urdu Rekhti Poetry 1780-1870; and ‘A Woman More Worth than any Man’: History and Vision in Nine Shakespeare Plays (forthcoming 2024). Her book, On the Edge: A Hundred Years of Hindi Fiction on Same-Sex Desire will appear from Penguin in August 2023. She co-edited the path-breaking Same-Sex Love in India, and has translated several works of fiction and poetry from Hindi to English, including Chocolate, Ugra’s 1927 collection of stories on male homosexuality, and Mahadevi Varma’s My Family. She divides her time between Missoula and Gurgaon.
Abstract:
This talk examines the shades of difference between translating non-fiction, fiction, and poetry from Hindi and Urdu to English and fiction from English to Hindi, especially with regard to words and idioms relating to romantic and erotic feeling and experience. “I consider the gendering of verbs and pronouns, the way Bombay film songs manage to avoid both in a way that English cannot, the way Urdu poetry teases the reader with ambiguities that sometimes are untranslatable, and the way my own poetry addresses issues of translation in its original sense (moving from one space and time to another) as well as its more specific sense with regard to languages.”
The next faculty seminar will be held on 26 July, 2023. Ms. Ishika Saxena will be discussing the paper titled ‘Deconstructing the Universal of Consent’. Prof (Dr.) Rinku Lamba will be the discussant.
Abstract
This paper will argue that the normative model of understanding sexual violence requires expansion and reworking to account for the full complexity of this nature of this violence. This normative model characterizes sexual assault by the presence or absence of consent.
This notion of consent operates as a universal which does not account for several particulars such as persons who may not be able to consent. Such particulars may be cultural specificities, socio-political conditions of inequality, as well as the inaccessibility of freedom to most people. This paper wishes to extrapolate the role of equality and freedom in how ‘ideal’ consent is understood. Hegemonic (such as social practices) and institutional elements (such as the law) intersect to produce this current understanding of sexual violence.
This paper focuses on deconstructing consent by focusing on two such particulars; queerness and disability. Queerness is unaccounted for by the logic of the definition of rape which when positioned as the gravest form of sexual harm, assumes that harm is caused by a penis-bearing individual in all cases. Within the legal definitions of this framework, there is an assumption of a giver-recipient dynamic to sexual intercourse, which is a heterosexual presumption. Alongside this, the question of disability becomes relevant at the conceptual level as it elucidates the theoretical limitations of the notion of freedom, i.e., free will.
The consent framework of sexual assault is an oversimplification of a complex problem. These particulars affect how consent plays out in actual practice. The inadequacy of the universal is elucidated through the particulars that are unaccounted for by this universal. It is therefore necessary to ask if this is the best universal for understanding sexual assault. “
This week’s faculty seminar will be presented by Devyani Srivastava and Laksha on their research titled ” “Status of Women in the Karnataka State Police”.
Abstract
This report presents findings from an assessment conducted by the National Law School of India University (NLSIU) on the status and role of policewomen in Karnataka. The state government is working to increase women’s representation in its police from existing 8 percent to 25 percent. Given this, the study aims to provide an evidence base for institutional reform needed to ensure a supportive environment for policewomen. It does this in three ways: one, by highlighting patterns and shortfalls in women’s deployment across ranks, districts, units and roles; two, identifying factors (social, cultural and institutional) that are either impeding women’s performance or driving their growth within the institution; and three, measuring gaps in views among officers, mainly female, on the importance of women in policing. It is hoped the findings will inform and augment the department’s ongoing efforts and planning to make sure women not just join the police service but are able to participate meaningfully at all levels. The study also seeks to contribute to the growing research on gender and policing emanating from the global south and further diversify police reform discourse taking place both within the country and globally.
This week faculty seminar on 12 July, 2023 will feature a discussion on the paper titled ‘Reflections on Rabindranath Tagore’s Religion of Man’ by Prof. (Dr.) Rinku Lamba.
Abstract
“Charles Taylor’s scholarship on the social imaginary of the modern west — in terms of a vision of moral order anchored in notions of equality, economy, and self-government, as well as a conception of the public sphere — is important for many reasons. It illustrates a ‘cultural’ approach to comprehend modernity, which Taylor himself endorses, as compared to an ‘a cultural’ understanding of modernity that views the phenomenon as linked predominantly to material changes in society that can be replicated in different parts of the world wherever similar material changes are ushered. Further, and consistent with ideas about multiple and alternative modernities, Taylor’s work inspires interrogations of the contents of the social imaginaries that sustain modernity in other jurisdictions, including India. Such interrogations will entail studies of doctrines, symbols and embodied practices all of which, according to Taylor, are sites for comprehending the vision of moral order that anchors a social imaginary.
To contribute to the emerging scholarship about the vision of moral order that anchors Indian modernity, and this paper is part of that broader task. Admittedly, the task involved requires work by a whole community of scholars, and I cannot pretend to provide some overarching answer to questions about what constitutes that vision of moral order. But I wish to focus on the political thought of Rabindranath Tagore – as a doctrinal site – to contribute to the larger task of delineating the particular understandings of religion (with respect to themes of hierarchy, self-rule, independence, state-society relationship) that anchor the vision of moral order underpinning the social imaginaries of modern India.”
The first public lecture for 2023-24 will take place on 13 July 2023. Our first guest speaker is Dr. Prachi Deshpande who will be delivering a talk titled “The Modi Script, Writing, and the Marathi Language in History” based on her recently published book, Scripts of Power: Writing, Language Practices, and Cultural History in Western India (Orient Blackswan, 2023).
About the Speaker
Dr. Prachi Deshpande is Associate Professor of History at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. Her interests are in historiography, memory studies, language historiography, and regional politics. She is the author of Creative Pasts: Historical Memory and Identity in western India (2007) and of Scripts of Power: Writing, Language Practices, and Cultural History in Western India (2023).
Abstract
A cursive script called Modi (moḍī) was in use from the fifteenth century to write in Marathi. Modi’s usage expanded under the medieval Sultanat and early modern Maratha kingdoms within a broad di-graphia: literati used Balbodh (a variant of today’s Devanagari script) for literary and sacred texts, and Modi for letters and revenue records (which were frequently bilingual, with Persian). In the nineteenth century, print technology favoured Balbodh, as it could render a larger range of phonemes current in Marathi speech, and Modi usage gradually declined. Devanagari is today the official script used to write Marathi, even though recent years have seen a resurgence in the interest in Modi. Overall, the story of the Modi script usually appears as a ‘lack,’ ‘deviation’ or afterthought from the story of Marathi language history proper, even though it has great symbolic value as a visual icon of the early modern Maratha state. In this talk, drawing on my recently published book Scripts of Power, I focus on the practice, usage, and changing meanings and deployments of the Modi script to probe the interplay between writing, script, and language and its relationship to bureaucratic and social power. I am interested in how a now-marginal and infrequently-used script like Moḍī can tell us about social and regional power and identity, and offer fresh ways to think about language history.
The Centre for Environmental Law, Education, Research and Advocacy (CEERA), NLSIU and the Department of Justice, Ministry of Law and Justice, GoI, is organising the second Prof. V. S. Mallar Memorial Legal Aid Competition from July-October 2023. This competition is organised as part of the pan India Legal Literacy and Legal Awareness Programme.
About the Competition
The Legal Aid Clinic Competition shall be a 4 (four) month-pronged Competition. Further, access to legal education is a necessary corollary to the right of free legal aid. With the advancement of digital technologies, this right has become all the more accessible. Legal aid clinics, particularly those functioning under the aegis of educational institutions, play a pivotal role in improving community access to legal information and education and in engaging the youth in mass literacy dissemination efforts.
The endeavor of the second edition of this Competition is to further augment and strengthen the activities of the legal aid cells across the country to spread essential legal awareness by conducting awareness drives and various other creative initiatives and campaigns to bring to the fore the presence of informational asymmetry contributing
directly to the lack of legal awareness.
The competition shall comprise six core deliverables which shall include:
ACCESS TO LEGAL AID: PRISON CLINIC
LOK ADALAT
ENGAGEMENT WITH STREET VENDORS
SPEED MENTORING
NON-PROFIT PARTNERING
FINAL REPORT
For more details on the competition and the deliverables, please read the brochure.
Awards & 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 8 other students, who will formulate the Core Team
Other Students, whose participation may be certified by the Participating Institution
Registration Details
The registration fee 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 June 30, 2023.
The National Webinar is jointly organised by DPIIT IPR CHAIRS : WBNUJS, NLSIU, GNLU, IIT Roorkee and Tezpur University.
Overview
Technology and innovation are driving in the media and entertainment industry. This includes everything from cutting-edge special effects developed for movies (and then adopted across other industries) to streaming media, virtual reality gaming, and new delivery channels for news, music, and advertising. This has had major implications for legislators, policymakers, judges, advocates, lawyers, and students of law. For instance, freedom of speech and expression has extended from the physical format to digital and social media, giving rise to the hitherto unknown problems of fake news, online abuse, sponsored posts, harassment, etc. that have the public and private scuttling for measures to contain. It is believed that many such challenges will arise in the future. They are bound to evolve with the practice of law in courts. Even minor changes and developments can force one to ponder if the legal and regulatory systems are equipped to deal with such shifts.
With digitalization and globalization gaining impetus in the production of content; the media and entertainment industry is thriving through momentum due to dilution and ease in relaxations of various regulations in the governance of the broadcasting sectors by the government. The intangible rights like Creative works and innovative works coupled with unique creations of the inventor, essentially implying Copyright often demands protection from data theft, duplication, and piracy concerns. Moreover, the Country’s film, television, and online video services industries contribute a gross output of INR 349 thousand crore and employ 2.6 million people. The media and entertainment sector grew at a higher rate than the economy (7.8%) in 2019. It has consistently improved its ranking on the WIPO Global Innovation Index (46th in 2021 from 52nd in 2019). The creative industries not only entertain and create employment opportunities, but also help and promote country’s creative and cultural industries across the world. The creative sector has the potential to build innovative and new experiences and reflect India’s soft power. Therefore, creating copyright awareness among the youth of the country becomes imperative. It is evident that digitalisation has opened up a world of opportunities for the media and entertainment industry. At the same time, it has threatened and disrupted the traditional methods giving way to emerging business and work models. Internet penetration has revolutionised e-commerce, brand building, public outreach, online streaming, etc. It has also brought certain issues to the forefront that include online trolling, surveillance, stalking.
This weekend, NLSIU is excited to host a campus reunion for the batch of 2012 as they celebrate 10 years of their graduation from law school.
On May 27, 2023, our alumni from the 2012 batch will be spending the day on campus re-connecting with batchmates, faculty, and other members of the NLS community.
The first such campus reunion post pandemic took place in July 2022 with the batch of 2011. We were delighted when the batch of 2012 too reached out to plan their reunion on campus. We asked them to share their thoughts and this is what they had to say:
“Time flies, doesn’t it? It’s hard to believe that it has already been 10 years since we walked across that stage together, filled with dreams and aspirations for the future. As we embark on this exciting milestone, we can’t help but feel a surge of nostalgia and anticipation for our upcoming reunion.
It seems like just yesterday we were juggling exams, “last last day” project submissions, late-night trips to Chetta, unforgettable adventures, and forging bonds that have lasted a decade. Now, we stand at the threshold of a reunion, an opportunity to reconnect, reminisce, and celebrate how far we’ve come since those unforgettable university days.
Our reunion promises to be more than just a gathering of familiar faces; it’s a chance to rediscover the spirit of camaraderie that defined our time together. Whether you’ve pursued your passions, climbed corporate ladders, started businesses, or dedicated yourself to noble causes, this reunion serves as a testament to our collective accomplishments.
Imagine the stories we’ll share, the laughter that will fill the room, and the memories that will flood our minds. It’s a chance to catch up with old friends, renew friendships, and create new connections. We’ve all embarked on unique journeys, and this reunion is an opportunity to honor the diverse paths we’ve taken while celebrating the common thread that unites us.
Join us as we gather once again, as the Batch of 2012, to reminisce about late-night conversations in the acad, Univ Week shenanigans, and the cherished friendships that stood the test of time, to reconnect with professors that had a profound impact on our lives, and explore how the once familiar campus walls have changed over time.
Mark your calendars, reconnect with your fellow batchmates, and get ready for an unforgettable reunion that will remind us of the enduring spirit of our law school years. Together, let’s celebrate a decade of growth and the infinite possibilities that lie ahead!
We are very grateful for NLS for hosting us and can’t wait to see you all at the reunion!”
Alumni Reflections
The event was an opportunity for our alumni to reconnect with each other and the NLS community, share their experiences and stories, and reminisce about their time as students on campus. Besides nostalgia and a celebration of friendships, this reunion also was an opportunity to foster meaningful conversations, form new connections, and further strengthen the alumni network. The day included a brief address by NLSIU’s Vice Chancellor Prof. Sudhir Krishnaswamy, a lunch with faculty and staff, a campus tour, a photo session, and high tea.
Vrinda Bhandari, Advocate on Record, Supreme Court of India, Class of 2012:
“It was a wonderful experience and a great way to reconnect with old friends and reminisce about the “good old days”! Seeing the old acad block, the basketball court, Nilgiris hostel, the new library, and meeting some of our professors made me very nostalgic. The university also gave us a copy of our admission forms written in 2007 – reading the answers to why we wanted to study law was super fun!”
Ankita Godbole, Associate (International Arbitration) at Lévy Kaufmann-Kohler, Class of 2012:
“The 10-Year Reunion was a lovely and fun walk down memory lane. It was great to visit Law School, meet the professors and take a look around campus; seeing how much had changed, but equally, how much had remained just the same. The highlight, however, was reuniting with my classmates, attempting to catch up on the last 10-years of their lives in two days, and realizing that while we had all gone places in life, we were still the “enthu” Batch of ‘12!”
Sowjhanya Shankaran, Advocate at Chambers of Siddharth Aggarwal, Class of 2012:
“Being back at NLS 11 years after we graduated was both overwhelming and reassuring at the same time! While there have been so many wonderful new changes to the campus, it was truly like homecoming being able to meet many of our old professors and all the library staff. Our discussion with Prof. Sudhir Krishnaswamy was especially eye opening — kudos on his efforts to strengthen the law school faculty and in enabling institutional mental health support for students. I will most fondly remember reconnecting with old friends at the familiar spots on campus and reading our 11-year old admission forms. A huge thanks to Akanksha Sharma and Sanchet at the NLS Alumni Office for so brilliantly bringing it all together!”
We look forward to hosting more such milestone gatherings for other batches and courses in the years ahead!
For any other information, please write to Ms. Sowjhanya () or Ms. Leeneshwari () from the batch of 2012, or to
