News Type: Event

NLS faculty member Radhika Chitkara will discuss the paper titled “An Exceptionally Special Law: Constraints Over Emergency Powers under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act.” Prof. Arun Thiruvengadam will be the discussant.

Abstract: 

The Supreme Court judgment of 15 October 2022 in the Gadchiroli conspiracy case on the issue of sanction for prosecution, urgently overturning the High Court judgment of the day before, offers a fecund opportunity to review the nature of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act as an ’emergency’ regime. This paper locates itself within the age-old and burgeoning literature on the relationship between emergency executive powers and the Rule of Law. In what manner, and to what extent, is the UAPA bound to the Rule of Law? What is the model of emergency regime at operation under the UAPA? Invoking sanction for prosecution as an example of review of emergency powers, I attempt to answer these questions by focusing on the nature of constraints on executive power designed into the architecture of the law.

This paper does not critically interrogate emergency jurisprudence under constitutional and common law. It also excludes justifications, necessity and functions of emergency laws, as well as the construction of terrorism as their legitimate object. Instead, it seeks to evaluate the UAPA on its own terms, as an emergency law with wide derogations from fundamental rights and established mechanisms of checks and balances.

The paper offers a brief background on the distinct ways in which jurisprudence and State practise characterises the relationship between emergencies and Rule of Law, in order to explain the choice of constraints as a relevant index for compliance with Rule of Law. It then surveys the nature and types of constraints that may be encoded in special emergency regimes, with appropriate examples from the Constitution of India and prior anti-terror laws. Finally, the paper turns to an evaluation of the architectural and political design under the UAPA.

I argue that models of emergency regimes are better understood not as binaries, but as a sliding-scale or spectrum in terms of their relationship with Rule of Law. I demonstrate that the UAPA represents not one, but four distinct emergency regimes, steadily tending towards “legal black holes” in light of existing legal and political constraints. The Supreme Court judgment in the Gadchiroli case is but one illustration of this tendency.

 

On 23 December (Friday), we are hosting a book event on “Acts of Media: Law and Media in Contemporary India”. We will have a panel comprising the book’s contributing authors who will introduce and briefly discuss the book. We also have a few faculty members come in as discussants. This will be followed by a Q & A session.

About the book: Acts of Media: Law and Media in Contemporary India, New Delhi: Sage, 2022

Acts of Media brings together contributions from leading academics, lawyers, researchers and policy experts about contemporary India and Sri Lanka. This book seeks to consolidate a field of multidisciplinary work around media technologies that intersects with legal scholarship The approaches to law and media taken in this volume challenge us to think outside of traditional disciplinary descriptions. Rather than approaching the law as being outside of, and constantly catching up with the media, the contributors of this book view law and media as being deeply intertwined.

The book can be downloaded here.

The speakers have requested interested attendees to browse the book before attending the event.

Speakers:

Siddharth Narrain, Prof. Ravi Sundaram, and Prof. Jinee Lokaneeta.

Siddharth Narrain is a lawyer and legal scholar working in the field of public law and socio-legal studies. He is currently a Scientia PhD Candidate, Faculty of Law & Justice, University of New South Wales (UNSW), Sydney. Siddharth has a BA LLB (Hons) degree from NLSIU, a PG Diploma in journalism from ACJ, Chennai, and an LLM from Harvard Law School. He has also co-edited (with Dr. Mayur Suresh) The Shifting Scales of Justice: The Supreme Court in Neoliberal India (Orient BlackSwan, Hyderabad, 2014).

Prof. Ravi Sundaram co- founded the Sarai programme at the CSDS along with Ravi Vasudevan and the Raqs Media Collective. Sarai grew to become one of India’s best-known experimental and critical research sites on media. Along with colleagues, Sundaram co-edited the Sarai Reader series, The Public Domain (2001), The Cities of Everyday Life (2002), Shaping Technologies (2003), Crisis Media (2004). Sundaram wrote Pirate Modernity: Media Urbanism in Delhi (2010) and edited No Limits: Media Studies from India (Delhi, 2015). His recent book Technopharmacology (with Joshua Neves, Aleena China and Susanna Paasonen) came out from Minnesota and Meson Press (2022). He is currently finishing his next book project, Events and Affections: post-public media circulation. Sundaram’s essays have been translated into various languages in India, Asia, and Europe.

Prof. Jinee Lokaneeta is Professor of Political Science and International Relations at Drew University, New Jersey. Her areas of interest include law and violence, critical political and legal theory, human rights, and interdisciplinary legal studies. She is the author of The Truth Machines: Policing, Violence, and Scientific Interrogations in India (2020) and Transnational Torture: Law, Violence, and State Power in the United States and India ([2011] 2012) and the co-editor with Nivedita Menon and Sadhna Arya of Feminist Politics: Struggles and Issues (2001).

Discussants:

NLS faculty members Dr. Rinku Lamba, Srijoni Sen, and Kunal Ambasta

The Law and Technology Society, NLSIU invites students, practitioners and academicians across all areas of law to a panel discussion on the Draft Digital Personal Data Protection Bill, 2022 on Saturday, December 17, 2022.

The event will involve panelists from across the spectrum of privacy law dealing with an extremely contemporary issue. E-Certificates will be provided to the attendees.

Panelists

Ms Malavika Raghavan: Ms Raghavan is a doctoral candidate at the London School of Economic’s Information Systems and Innovation Group and currently a Senior Fellow at the Future for Privacy Forum. Her work entails interdisciplinary research in India, focusing on the impacts of digitization on the lives of lower-income individuals. Her work since 2016 has focused on the regulation and use of personal data in service delivery by the Indian State and private sector actors, often enabled by expansive State-supported technical and regulatory architectures.

Mr Jaideep Reddy: Mr Reddy is currently Counsel in the Telecom, Media and Technology vertical of Trilegal and a visiting faculty at the National Law School of India. He has previously been part of Nishith Desai Associates in the capacity of the Leader in their TMT vertical. His practice focuses on disruptive technologies and their interaction with the law, including cryptocurrency and blockchain technology, payments, privacy and cybersecurity, and other technology-related issues (disputes, regulatory and public policy).

Mr Vivek Reddy: Mr Reddy is a Senior Advocate of the Andhra Pradesh High Court, and a partner at Vivek Reddy Law Chambers, dealing extensively with privacy matters. He is a graduate of NLSIU and Harvard Law School and a member of the Governing Council of National Law University, Delhi. He had also worked on the initial Joint Parliamentary Committee report on the Data Protection Bill.

Ms Sriya Sridhar: Ms Sridhar is currently a part of the in-house legal team at Setu, a fin-tech company (part of the Pine Labs group), prior to which she practiced at a law firm within the IP and Technology practice. Her practice focuses primarily on technology laws (currently with a focus on fin-tech) and contracting, privacy laws and regulatory compliance. She has worked on advising on the intersection between law and emerging technologies, including intermediary liability issues, blockchain technology and e-commerce. She also worked extensively with business and product teams to translate their needs into legal documentation, especially in a tech context. Apart from her practice, she researches and writes on topics such as fin-tech regulatory developments, privacy rights, digital governance, and open access policy.

Mr Divij Joshi: Mr Joshi is an independent lawyer and researcher. He graduated with a B.A., LL.B.(Hons.) degree from the National Law School of India University, Bangalore, in 2016. Subsequently, he joined a litigation practice in Bombay, and then as a research fellow, conducting legal and policy research on issues of technology, urban governance, and environmental laws. he was a Mozilla Technology Policy Fellow for 2019/20 during which he created the AI Observatory, interrogating government use of Automated Decision Making in India. He is also an editor at SpicyIp.

About L-Tech

The Law and Technology Society (‘L-Tech’) is one of Asia’s oldest student-run tech-law groups and is committed to exploring the boundless contours of the intriguing interface between law and technology. The main objective of the committee is to build up-to-date scholarship in this field by making research panels and by organizing a series of interesting events including seminars, conferences, policy-making competitions, essay competitions, etc. Our flagship event is Consilience, which is an annual multi-day conference. It was started in the year 2000 and holds the record to be the first of its kind in India. In the past, the society has had the privilege to host events with dignitaries such as Jacob Appelbaum, Anthony Taubman, Richard Stallman, Stephen Hobe, etc. It is one amongst the many societies at National Law School of India University, Bangalore.

Following up on the success of ‘Kumbalangi Nights’ movie screening, we will be screening the Oscar nominated and critically acclaimed Bosnian film Quo Vadis, Aida? (Where are you going, Aida?) this week. The screening will take place on December 16, 2022 at the Krishnappa Memorial Hall, OAB from 7 PM onwards.

Quo Vadis, Aida? is an intensely moving, compelling portrayal of the events that unfolded in Srebrenica during the Bosnian war. The film will be screened with subtitles. The 2020 Bosnian film is written, produced and directed by Jasmila Žbanić. It was nominated for Best International Feature Film at the 93rd Academy Awards and won the Award for Best Film at the 34th European Film Awards.

Official trailer (with subtitles) available here
Reviews: Sight and Sound, The Guardian and The Times
Rotten Tomatoes: 100% approval

See you all there!

The National Law School of India University, Bengaluru, is pleased to invite you to the inaugural session of “Equalizing the Role of Women in Policing”, an online dialogue series featuring policies, programs and initiatives from India and around the world aimed at realizing women’s equitable growth and contribution to policing.

This is an initiative under the “Benchmarking and Strengthening the Role of Women in Karnataka Police” project of NLSIU. To know more about this project, click here.

Webinar 1 – Global Practices on Women in Police

The first session is on “Global Practices on Women in Police” and features Ms. Jane Townsley, Executive Director of the International Association of Women in Policing (IAWP) and a senior police officer (retired) with over 30 years’ policing experience in the United Kingdom. It will take place online on Tuesday, 20 December, from 5.30 pm – 7.30 pm IST.

Ms. Townsley will present global trends on women’s representation in law enforcement and highlight key lessons from ongoing reform initiatives aimed at achieving women’s equitable representation and participation in policing. The session will also include a presentation by Ms. Roshni Kapoor who worked with NLSIU to develop a compendium of good practices from around the world on women in policing. Ms. Kapoor will highlight specific measures including policies, programs and initiatives featured in the compendium on promoting women’s role in policing.

About the speaker:

Jane Townsley (UK) is a UN Women Senior Police Expert, as well as the co-author of the UN Women Handbook on Gender-responsive Policing Services for Women and Girls Subject to Violence. Jane is a senior police officer (retired) with over 30 years’ policing experience in the UK, retiring in 2013 at the rank of Chief Inspector. Since retirement, she has established her consultancy specializing in capacity building for gender-responsive policing and service delivery to local communities and a focus on the empowerment of women in policing. She is the Executive Director of the International Association of Women Police (IAWP), having previously serving as President between 2009 and 2015. She has helped to lead the IAWP with members in over 70 countries.

Agenda:

5.30pm  – Welcome remarks
Dr. Mrinal Satish, Professor of Law, NLSIU

5.35pm – Introduction to the dialogue series
Devyani Srivastava, Principal Investigator, Women in Karnataka Police Project, NLSIU

5.40pm – Presentation on “Programs, Policies and Initiatives for Strengthening the Role of Women in Policing: A Compendium of Global Good Practices”
Roshni Kapoor, Consultant, NLSIU

6.00pm – Keynote Speech | “Women Policing across the Globe: Key Trends”
Ms. Jane Townsley, Executive Director, International Association of Women Police

6.45pm – Discussions

7.30pm – Concluding remarks

How do I register?

Register here for the session on 20 December.
*After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

About the Dialogue Series

With state police services in India set to recruit more women, the dialogue series intends to bring together police leaders, practitioners, researchers and global experts in a collective dialogue on different issues surrounding women in policing. It will feature ongoing research and initiatives on themes such as gender mainstreaming tools, women police units, role of women police in driving reforms, women police leadership, and gender sensitization with a view to facilitate learning and critical reflection.

The series will continue through next year and will be open to all.

We look forward to your support and active participation in the series to enable insightful and relevant discussions.

Watch the full video here:

 

 

This week’s public lecture will be delivered by Dr. Suraj Yengde on the topic “The Unearned Privileges of Meritorious Castes.” The lecture will take place on December 9, 2022 at 4 PM in the Old Academic Block.

About the Speaker

Dr. Suraj Yengde is a DPhil candidate at the Faculty of History at Oxford University. Dr. Yengde is founder and curator of Dalit Film Festival and co-founder of Equity in Policy Education initiative started at Harvard.

He is also the author of the bestseller, Caste Matters (2019) and a co-editor of the award-winning anthology with Dr. Anand Teltumbde, The Radical in Ambedkar: Critical Reflections (2018). Caste Matters was a bestseller and listed as the “Best Non-fiction Book of the Decade” by The Hindu. The book’s Malayalam translation won the Kerala state award for translation. The book has been translated into three languages, with four more in progress. He has written over a hundred articles in academic and non-academic journals. His articles have appeared in Ethnic & Racial Studies, Diaspora Studies, Caravan, Seminar, Economic & Political Weekly, among others. He is currently working on two manuscripts. The first, Caste, A History of the World, is under contract with Allen Lane and the second, Biography of Dr B R Ambedkar under contract with Juggernaut.

Abstract

This talk will interrogate the personal-family centered question of caste and the privileges that remain unconcerned with the dominant castes claiming castelessness. How caste, culture, and capital interact in an intimate sense in the Brahminical fold will also be analyzed in the lecture.

 

 

We invite you to a discussion on ‘Artificial Intelligence and Human Rights’ organised at the Bangalore International Centre on Wednesday, 30th November.  The event will be held from 6 pm to 7.30 pm.

The discussion is a part of a project at the National Law School of India University, supported by the Consulate General of the Federal Republic of Germany, Bengaluru. This project is an effort to bring together a multidisciplinary understanding of Artificial Intelligence’s impact on human rights, and locate these conversations in local contexts and vocabularies. The event will include a Keynote Speech by Prof. Anupam Chander, Scott K. Ginsburg Professor of Law and Technology at Georgetown University Law Center, followed by a panel discussion moderated by NLSIU Vice-Chancellor, Prof. Sudhir Krishnaswamy.

How do I attend the event?

The event is open to the public. To attend this event, please RSVP here.

Panelists:

Prof. Anupam Chander
Scott K Ginsburg Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center

Anupam Chander is Scott K. Ginsburg Professor of Law and Technology at Georgetown University Law Center. The author of The Electronic Silk Road, he is an expert on the global regulation of new technologies. He has been a visiting law professor at Yale, the University of Chicago, Stanford, Cornell, and Tsinghua. He previously served as the Director of the California International Law Center and Martin Luther King, Jr. Professor of Law at UC Davis. He serves as an Adjunct Senior Research Scholar at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, a faculty advisor to Georgetown’s Institute for Technology Law and Policy, and a faculty affiliate of Yale’s Information Society Project. He is the founder of the Georgetown Global TechNet Working Group.

A recipient of an Andrew Mellon grant on the topic of surveillance and Google Research Awards, he has served on ICTSD/World Economic Forum expert groups on the digital economy and as a consultant to UNCTAD and the World Bank. He serves as the principal book reviews editor of the Journal of International Economic Law.

Anita Gurumurthy
Executive Director, IT for Change

Anita Gurumurthy is a founding member and executive director of IT for Change where she leads research on the platform economy, data and AI governance, democracy in the digital age, and feminist frameworks on digital justice. Anita actively engages in national and international advocacy on digital rights and contributes regularly to academic and media spaces. She serves as advisor and expert on various bodies including the United Nations Secretary-General’s 10-Member Group in support of the Technology Facilitation Mechanism , the Paris Peace Forum’s working group on algorithmic governance, Save the Children’s ICT4D Brain Trust, and Minderoo Tech & Policy Lab‘s Board.

Siddharth Das
Co-founder, Univ.AI

Siddharth co-founded Univ.AI after a decade-long career in India’s fast growing fintech sector. Most recently, he served as CEO, Reliance Jio Money, the fintech arm of Jio. Earlier, he was COO of PayZippy, Flipkart’s first payments business, and COO of CRIF-HIghMark, India’s only and leading Credit Bureau focussed on credit for the underprivileged. Before moving to India, and into fintech, Siddharth spent a decade in San Francisco working first, as product manager for tech companies, and later as an Analytics business leader for FICO, the company that invented credit scoring. He holds a graduate degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and an undergraduate degree from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Roorkee. Siddharth is a creator, whose interests range from architecture to audiophile sound. At the moment, he’s building a modernist house he designed, and alongside, working on finishing his third sound system.

Following this public event, an academic workshop will also be held at the NLSIU campus on 1st December 2022. The workshop will be a closed-doors event.

 

The next faculty seminar will feature a talk by Dr. Sukhalata Sen on “Coining Legitimacy: Law and Technology in India”. Dr. Mrinal Satish will be the moderator.

 Abstract of the paper

This paper examines the interface of law, technology and social lives of people in Calcutta in India. Set in the nineteenth century, it complicates transferring technologies of minting money to a distant region.  As most technologies arrived as a finished product of a distant country, it explores how its assimilation into a newer society affected the expectation and actual usage of that technology. To understand this better, it uses counterfeiting of the Indian rupees to explore the problems of assimilation and the inversion of such technologies. It juxtaposes this with the political and cultural claims of these technologies for the East India Company. It tries to explore how law was used to negotiate between such political claims of the Company and its misuse/ appropriation in the Indian society. The setting up of ‘illegality at a time when the Company did not have the monopoly over making money drives this paper towards its ambitions of connecting other parts of empire and facilitating trade.

Our next public lecture will be a talk by the guest speaker, Mr. Chiranjiv Singh on the topic: “Of Untold Stories and Unlikely Migrations: Partition Refugees in Bangalore.”

About the Speaker

Mr. Chiranjiv Singh, former Ambassador of India to UNESCO in Paris, joined the Indian Administrative Service in 1969. He retired in 2005 as Development Commissioner of Karnataka and Additional Chief Secretary to Govt. of Karnataka. During his career he held various positions in the central and state governments, some of which are: Principal Secretary, Finance Dept.; Development Commissioner Northern Karnataka; Principal Secretary, Agriculture; Secretary, Culture and Tourism Depts.; Director General Administrative Training Institute, Mysore, among many others. Since his retirement he is associated with numerous non-governmental organizations working in the fields of rural development, environment and culture. For his services rendered to the state he was awarded the “Rajyothsava Award” in 2005 by the Government of Karnataka. At present, he is President of the Alliance Française, Bangalore.

Abstract

Partition histories focus usually on migration to the north of the country, but several migrants came, through often odd and circuitous roots, to the south, particularly Bangalore. Mr Chiranjiv Singh, former Indian Ambassador to UNESCO, comes from one such family. Bringing his many years of experience both as a resident of Bangalore and as the Development Commissioner of Karnataka, Mr. Singh will explore, through a mix of autography and academic research, the story of Partition families mingling with the growing, complicated and fascinating urban space of Bangalore.

The Chair for Consumer Law and Practice (CLAP), National Law School of India University, Bengaluru is organising the International Conference on ‘New Facets on Consumer Protection Challenges and the Way Forward’ on November 19, 2022. The conference is being organised in association with the Ministry of Consumer Affairs, Food and Public Distribution, GoI.

The conference will focus on a large array of issues on Consumer Protection. The agenda of the conference will mainly focus on following themes:

• Consumer Protection with respect to Sale of Goods and services through social media platforms;
• Consumer Protection from Fake Reviews on E-Commerce Portals;
• Consumer Protection & Fall Back Liability
• Imposing service charges on Consumer for the services rendered at Hotels and Restaurants;
• Recognition of Right to Repair as a Consumer Right;
• Assessment of Consumer Protection in India in par with International Best Practices
• Sustainable Consumerism
• Settlement of Cross Border Consumer Disputes
• Dark patterns and Consumer Protection

The one-day conference will be hosted via Zoom and will involve an inaugural session followed by six parallel sessions and the valedictory session. The full schedule along with the links to attend each session is available here.
For more details, please read the brochure here.

Registration

To register for the event, please click here.
Please note, certificates will be issued only to registered participants.