This week, NLS faculty member Atreyee Majumder will discuss her essay “To have a country so important: on Law as a Sign for War”. Professor Diya Deviah will be the discussant.

Abstract: 

This paper, written for a special issue of NLSIR led by Rohini Sen, shows the international legal order as a sign system that stands for the threat of or imminence of war. It further shows that the order treats young sovereigns as trainee sovereigns who in turn are keen on transacting in the currency of international law to access greater and more meaningful sovereign power.

NLS faculty members Dr. Atreyee Majumder, Dr. Sushmita Pati, and Dr. Karthick Ram Manoharan will be speaking during a discussion on “In Conflict and Conversation – Indian Cities, Livelihoods, and Politics” on 29th August 2023 at the Bangalore International Centre. The event is being organised by the Cambridge University Press and will be conducted from 2:30 pm onwards. The details of the sessions are provided below:

Session 1 – Contours of the City
2:30 PM onwards 

• VIKAS KUMAR, Azim Premji University
• ANANT KAMATH National Institute of  Advanced Studies
• NEETHI P., Indian Institute for  Human Settlements
• ATREYEE MAJUMDER , National Law School of  India University

Session 2 – An India Then, an India Now  
4:45 PM onwards 

• SUSHMITA PATI, National Law School of  India University
• ADIL HOSSAIN, Azim Premji  University
• SUPRIYA ROYCHOWDHURY, National Institute of  Advanced Studies
• KARTHICK RAM MANOHARAN, National Law School of  India University

To register, click here. 

This week’s faculty seminar will be held on 23rd August, 2023.  Prof.. Jasmine Joseph will be discussing on a working paper  titled “The search for a link between electoral expenses, regulation and corruption”.   Prof. Sanjay  Jain will be the discussant.

Abstract

The representative democracy of India is currently experiencing a rapid decline in both its substantive and procedural components. This paper focuses on analysing one specific procedural element: the electoral process. Electoral corruption is a significant factor contributing to India’s appalling position in the corruption perception index. This paper aims to explore how inadequately regulated electoral expenses can fuel electoral corruption, subsequently leading to widespread corruption.

A cursory examination is conducted to evaluate the regulatory framework governing election expenses in India and to identify its shortcomings. Additionally, the paper examines how the mismanagement of election expenditures could pave the way for corruption and highlights two crucial factors, apart from legislation, that play a role: transparency norms and public funding. However, these two factors are not extensively practiced in India.

This working paper primarily serves as a hypothesis development for a more extensive investigation into how the implementation of public funding can positively influence the corruption landscape.

This Wednesday, there will be a discussion about the India Justice Report (IJR) by Maja Daruwala, the Chief Editor, and Valay Singh, the project lead of IJR. Brief note about the IJR and previous reports are attached to this email.

About the Speakers: 

1.Valay Singh is the project lead of the India Justice Report. Valay Singh has worked in the development sector over the last 10 years, having been a media professional previously. His interests lie in issues of civil and political liberties, women and child rights, mainstreaming the narrative on justice, freedom of speech and expression and politics and religion. Valay is also the author of Ayodhya: City of faith, City of discord, published by Aleph Book Company.

2.Maja  Daruwala is the Chief Editor of the India Justice Report. A barrister from Lincoln’s Inn, she has been working to advocate for rights and social justice for over 40 years. She is actively engaged in numerous human rights initiatives and concentrates on issues relating to civil liberties including police reform, prison reform, right to information, discrimination, women’s rights, freedom of expression and human rights advocacy capacity building. Ms Daruwala’s interests lie particularly in the area of systemic reforms. She has focused her energies on issues of accountability and participation, which she believes are essential underpinnings for good governance and the realisation of human rights. She sits on several charitable boards including the Population Foundation of India and Centre for Social Justice. She was earlier the director of Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative and a Senior Adviser for the Tata Trusts.

On Friday, 11th August, 2023, Mr. Vikram Raghavan, NLS BA LLB 1997, will be presenting a talk on ‘Coups & Constitutions’. Vikram is the Lead Counsel at World Bank, Washington DC.

In this presentation, Vikram will focus on constitutional crises in countries ranging from Afghanistan, Myanmar, Sudan, and Niger. These crises arise from military coups, contested elections, and other extra-constitutional changes in governments. He will explore the international legal dimensions of these crises and examine how states and international organizations respond to these crises. Prof. Aparna Chandra will be the discussant.

About the speaker:

Vikram’s work covers a wide range of subjects: the Bank’s mandate and its Articles of Agreement, loan conditionality, post-conflict reconstruction, refugees and forced displacement, humanitarian crises, coups, sanctions, contractual disputes, expropriation, graduation, and sovereign debt. In over two-decades of his career at the Bank, he has worked on projects in many countries. They include Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, India, Mali, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, Philippines, Somalia, South Sudan, Sri Lanka, Yemen, and the West Bank and Gaza. He also works on legal and policy issues arising from the Bank’s engagements in countries affected by conflict, fragility, and violence. He  was a team member for the Bank’s flagship publication, the 2011 World Development Report Conflict, Security, and Development. He is also part of the team for the 2023 World Development Report on migration and forced displacement. He received the Bank’s Bretton Woods@75
award for his contributions to preserving the Bank’s institutional memory.

Before the World Bank, he was an associate at New York office of the international law firm, O’Melveny and Myers. He also co-founded the legal blog Law and Other Things. He is an active member of the American Society of International Law and has served on its executive council. He is particularly passionate about mentoring law students and junior lawyers and spends part of his vacation each year visiting new law schools to talk to students.

Published Work: His first book was Communications Law in India (2006) which has been cited by the Supreme Court of India. He has co-edited Comparative Constitutionalism in South Asia (2010) a collection of essays by leading scholars. More recently, he edited George Gadbois’s Supreme Court of India: The Beginnings (2017). He is presently working on a narrative history of how India emerged as a constitutional republic in 1950.

This is a closed-doors event and open to the NLS community only.

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. “