NLSIU will be conducting a second live information session on the Master’s Programme in Public Policy on March 31, 2023 from 5 p.m. – 6 p.m. This online information session will provide information on preparing for the NLSAT – MPP and the test pattern. Faculty will also discuss sample questions during the session.
DR. RINKU LAMBA, Associate Professor, Centre for the Study of Social Exclusion and Inclusive Policy, NLSIU
Please note, only candidates who have completed the registration process (i.e. those who have completed the payment for the NLSAT-MPP) will be eligible to attend the information session. Candidates who have already completed their registration may login to the admissions portal (admissions.nls.ac.in) and click on the webinar link to register for the information session.
If you are planning to appear for the NLSAT – MPP, don’t forget to complete your registration before the event. For queries or assistance, please write to
Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (Ministry of Commerce and Industry, Government of India) Chair on IPR, CIPRA, National Law School of India University, Bangalore, KIIT School of Law, Bhubaneswar, Odisha organise an International Round Table: A Conference on “Evolving trends for an International Regime on Intellectual property, Genetic Resources and Associated TK”.
Concept Note
The genetic resources that are ‘genetic materials of actual or potential value’ have increasing interlink with Intellectual Property and Traditional knowledge. The value of Genetic Resource as an IP as well as its association with IP has been discussed on different fora in different contexts. The WIPO-IGC established in 2000 has been debating for more than two decades issues pertaining to genetic resources, traditional knowledge and traditional cultural expressions. Beginning with an initial non-normative approach looking at defensive protection, to need for a legal instrument in 2003, through a ‘text-based negotiations’ decision in 2010-11, the ‘intersessional working groups’ leading progress, the emergence of single negotiating text and options around new patent disclosure requirement in 2012, and finally the Chair’s draft international legal instrument on GRs and associated TK in 2019 WIPO-IGC has trodden the turfs. The Chair’s draft is considered as the ‘basic proposal’ on which the negotiations will continue leading to diplomatic conference.
The genetic resources that are ‘genetic materials of actual or potential value’ have increasing interlink with Intellectual Property and Traditional knowledge. The value of Genetic Resource as an IP as well as its association with IP has been discussed on different fora in different contexts. The WIPO-IGC established in 2000 has been debating for more than two decades issues pertaining to genetic resources, traditional knowledge and traditional cultural expressions. Beginning with an initial non-normative approach looking at defensive protection, to need for a legal instrument in 2003, through a ‘text-based negotiations’ decision in 2010-11, the ‘inter sessional working groups’ leading progress, the emergence of single negotiating text and options around new patent disclosure requirement in 2012, and finally the Chair’s draft international legal instrument on GRs and associated TK in 2019 WIPO-IGC has trodden the turfs. The Chair’s draft is considered as the ‘basic proposal’ on which the negotiations will continue leading to diplomatic conference.
NLSIU will be conducting a second live information session on the LL.B. (Hons.) Programme on March 24, 2023 from 5 p.m. – 6 p.m. This online information session will provide information on preparing for the NLSAT – LLB and the test pattern. Faculty will also solve sample questions during the session.
Please note, only candidates who have completed the registration process (i.e. those who have completed the payment for the NLSAT-LLB) will be eligible to attend the information session. Candidates who have already completed their registration may login to the admissions portal (admissions.nls.ac.in) and click on the webinar link to register for the information session.
If you are planning to appear for the NLSAT – LLB, don’t forget to complete your registration before the event. For queries or assistance, please write to
The next public lecture will be delivered by Prof. (Dr.) Rajeev Bhargava on his book titled “Between Hope and Despair: 100 Ethical Reflections on Contemporary India”.
About the speaker
Prof. (Dr.) Rajeev Bhargava is a well-known political theorist whose work on individualism and secularism has received international acclaim. He is currently an Honorary Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi (CSDS), and Director of Parekh Institute of Indian Thought, CSDS. He was also CSDS’s Director from 2007 to 2014. Rajeev Bhargava has been a Professor at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi and University of Delhi, apart from teaching at several international universities.
About the book
“India’s collective ethical identity is under duress. We don’t seem to currently agree on what our collective good is. Some groups believe that India is finally rediscovering its Hindu identity and becoming a great nation-state. For others, this change has brought us on the verge of losing our civilisational character of being inclusive but not any less Hindu.
Is it possible to bring these groups with divergent views to discuss each other’s point of view? And do so reasonably, with an open mind? Rajeev Bhargava thinks it is. He believes that the legitimate concerns of all those disenchanted with the idea of an inclusive, pluralist India can actually be addressed within the basic framework of India’s constitutional democracy.
Through these short, elegant and lucid reflections on contemporary events, he takes the readers to the founding narrative of the republic and clarifies its ethical ideals. Readers are asked to join the process of reflection, to criticise with empathy, particularly where the moral compass to properly guide individual and collective action is lost and offer positive appraisals where due. If we get the fundamentals of our original ethical vision right, then, Bhargava subtly suggests, we might yet save our country from further polarisation and may even heal some of its divisions.” (Source: Bloomsbury)
The QAMRA Archival Project at NLSIU invites you to a guest lecture by Prof. Craig Konnoth on Epistemic Discrimination.
About the Speaker
Prof. Craig Konnoth is Martha Lubin Karsh and Bruce A. Karsh Bicentennial Professor of Law at the University of Virginia School of Law. He writes in health and civil rights, as well as on health data regulation. He is also active in LGBT rights litigation, and has filed briefs in the U.S. Supreme Court and the Tenth Circuit on LGBT rights issues. His publications have appeared or will appear in the Yale Law Journal, the Stanford Law Review, the Hastings Law Journal, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, the Iowa Law Review, the online companions to the Penn law review and the Washington & Lee Law Review, and as chapters in edited volumes. In 2022, he was named UVA’s John T. Casteen III Faculty Fellow in Ethics, a program that supports integrating ethical analysis and reasoning into courses. In 2021, he was awarded a Greenwall Foundation Fellowship, which is the nation’s foremost fellowship in bioethics for early career scholars.
Abstract
American antidiscrimination law and theory divide discrimination’s causes into two categories. On the one hand, there is address animus and bias. Individuals unreasonably hold harmful opinions about certain groups because of a negative attitude towards those groups. I refer to this as attitudinal discrimination. On the other hand, discrimination may be structural, where discrimination based on one factor—say money—is structurally related to a specific characteristic like race. This is commonly referred to as structural discrimination.
But some examples of discrimination fall into neither category. Consider the following examples:
During the perilous yellow fever outbreak of 1793 in Philadelphia, black pastors Absalom Jones and Richard Allen volunteered black people to assist with public health efforts based on the “assurance that people of [their] colour were not liable to take on the infection,” an assurance they later found to be false.[1]
More recently, Dorothy Roberts recounts how she faced representatives from the NAACP who, along with black advocates, doctors, and Congresspeople, supported drugs supposedly tailored to the supposedly unique biology of black people.[2]Roberts convincingly argues that this understanding harms black people in the long run.
Black Americans similarly have endorsed claims that they were immune to COVID-19 and discouraged vaccination in the black community.[3]
These cases described above fall into neither traditional category of discrimination. They do not necessarily involve unreasonable discrimination because of negative attitudes: in the first two examples, actors relied on what they (reasonably) believed to be robust medical authority, and in all three cases, attitudes are hardly negative. Nor is there any structural relationship to some additional characteristic like money.
I refer to this form of discrimination as epistemic discrimination. On this account, the discriminator in question does not have unreasonable attitudes towards the group. Rather, they believe the claims of sources of information that they reasonably consider reliable—for example, foremost medical authorities. This very early stage project will situate epistemic discrimination against “classical” forms of discrimination, address the comparative moral and legal liability of discriminators, and examine epistemic remedies for epistemic discrimination.
This week’s faculty seminar will feature a talk by Dr. Ashwini Tambe on the topic “When will the dawn of divorce arrive?”: An Itinerary of Pre-Legal Ideas about Divorce in Stree Magazine, 1930-1955″. NLS faculty member Prof. (Dr.) Sarasu will be the discussant.
About the speaker:
Dr. Ashwini Tambe is the Director of WGSS (Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Programme) and Professor of History and WGSS at George Washington University. Dr. Tambe is a scholar of transnational South Asian history who focuses on the relationship between law, gender and sexuality. She is also the Editorial Director of Feminist Studies, the oldest journal of interdisciplinary feminist scholarship in the United States. Over the past two decades, she has written about how South Asian societies regulate sexual practices. Her 2009 book Codes of Misconduct: Regulating Prostitution in Late Colonial Bombay (the University of Minnesota Press) traces how law-making and law-enforcement practices shaped the rise of the city’s red light district. Her 2019 book Defining Girlhood in India: A Transnational Approach to Sexual Maturity Laws (University of Illinois Press) explores how the expectation of sexual innocence is distributed in uneven ways for girls across class and caste groups. Both books examine the direction and flow of transnational influences. Her new book Transnational Feminist Itineraries (Duke University Press 2021, co-edited with Millie Thayer) features essays by leading gender studies scholars confronting authoritarianism and religious and economic fundamentalism.
Abstract:
In this paper, it is described how a Marathi monthly magazine for women, Stree, prepared the ground for the social acceptance of divorce before it was legally available. The magazine’s contents in its first two decades of publication gave unusual attention to the plight of women who sought to free themselves from difficult marriages, at a time when divorce was inaccessible for Hindu women in much of the region. Opinion articles and readers’ letters to the editor demonstrate a range of rhetorical strategies to positively depict divorce in a context where it was vilified as a culturally alien practice. In effect, this paper explains how the magazine sought to indigenize divorce among Marathi readers. In focusing on a community that produced a significant number of reformists and legislators who helped formalize Hindu women’s legal right to divorce at a national level, this study of Marathi readers, legal advisors, and commentators traces an itinerary of reformist ideas about divorce before they gained national legislative success.
National Law School of India University, Bengaluru is organising a campus visit at NLSIU on March 12, 2023 (Sunday). This campus visit will provide applicants to the NLSAT 2023 a unique opportunity to receive information on the 3-Year LL.B. (Hons.), Master’s in Public Policy, and Ph.D. programmes directly from the faculty members who teach these programmes, interact with current students, and get a chance to explore the University campus. Those interested in the 3-Year LL.B. (Hons.), Master’s in Public Policy, or the Ph.D. programmes are encouraged to attend. Parents/ guardians may also accompany the applicants.
Registration is mandatory. The last date to register for the campus visit was March 7th, 2023. A detailed schedule will be shared with registered attendees.
This week’s faculty seminar will feature a talk by Dr. Sebanti Chatterjee about her monograph – “Choral Voices: Ethnographic Imaginations of Sound and Sacrality” – that was published last month by Bloomsbury. Prof. (Dr.) Atreyee Majumder will be the discussant.
About the speaker:
Dr. Sebanti Chatterjee, Academic Fellow, NLSIU.
Sebanti is a cultural anthropologist with an interest in Sound Studies, Religious Studies, and Gender Studies. She earned her doctorate degree in Sociology from the Department of Sociology, Delhi School of Economics, Delhi University. Her areas of interest are anthropology of sound, visual documentation of cultural practices, research on gender violence and labour settings.
Abstract:
Choral Voices: Ethnographic Imaginations of Sound and Sacrality is about sacred and secular choirs in Goa and Shillong across churches, seminaries, schools, auditoriums, classrooms, reality TV shows, and festivals. Voice and genre emerge as social objects annotated by tradition, nostalgia, and innovation. Piety literally and metaphorically shapes the Christian lifeworld, predominantly those belonging to the Presbyterian and Catholic denominations. Indigeneity structures the political and cultural motifs in the making of the Christian musical traditions. Located at the intersection of Sociology, Anthropology, and Ethnomusicology, the choral voices emplace ‘affect’ and the visual-aural dispatch. Thus, sonic spectrum holds space for indigenous and global musicality. (Source: Bloomsbury)
NLS faculty members Dr. Rinku Lamba & Dr. Aniket Nandan will be speaking as part of the Policy Adda at the BIC Hub’ba 2023 this Sunday, February 26, 2023. They will be speaking on the topic ‘Why Policy Education in a University Matters’. Dr. Rinku and Dr. Aniket teach core courses of the Master’s Programme in Public Policy (MPP) at NLSIU.
