Category: India
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Anurag Deb: A Constitution of Principles: From Miller to Minerva Mills
Introduction In a succinct and surprisingly unanimous judgment in Miller and Cherry [2019] UKSC 41 the UK Supreme Court delivered an unprecedented rebuke to the Prime Minister in deciding that he had not shown “any reason – let alone a good reason” to advise the Queen to prorogue Parliament, ruling that the prorogation was unlawful,…
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Weekly round-up of events
This week’s event announcements include: ‘The Legal Framework for UK Aid After Brexit’, Current Legal Problems lecture, UCL, 1 November 2018 ‘”Things Done in the Dark and in the Middle of the Night”: Nehru, Kashmir, and the Subterfuges of Building Constitutional Democracy’, The Inaugural Arthur Berriedale Keith Lecture, Edinburgh, 5 November 2018 ~~~ UCL Current…
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Anurag Deb: Privacy as a Foundational Right: Lessons from the Indian Supreme Court
Introduction September 2018 may go down in Indian law as one of the most liberal months in the history of the country’s Supreme Court. From decriminalising ‘unnatural’ sex and adultery to declaring centuries-old religious practices to be unlawful discrimination, the judgments from India’s outgoing Chief Justice Dipak Misra and his fellow Justices have been hailed…
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Weekly round-up
This week’s announcement is below. ~~~ Call for Papers Indian Journal of Constitutional & Administrative Law [Volume II Issue I]: Submit by December 31 The Indian Journal of Constitutional & Administrative Law (IJCAL) is a student-edited, peer-reviewed, open access, bi-annual law review. IJCAL seeks to encourage path breaking research work in the fields of…
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Isaam Bin Haris: The ‘Continuing Mandamus’, Institutional Failure and Judicial Independence – Pakistan’s Three-Pronged Conundrum
On the 20th of April this year, the Supreme Court of Pakistan passed the first substantive order in the ‘Panama case’ – a phrase used to refer to the petitions filed by some members of the Opposition seeking disqualification of the then prime minister of Pakistan, Nawaz Sharif, on account of the names of his…
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Harshan Kumarasingham: Eastminster: the Westminster model in British Asia
Cross-posted from the Constitution Unit blog. The ‘Westminster model’ outside the British Isles tends to be associated with the former British settler colonies such as Australia, Canada and New Zealand. In a new book the influence of British ideas on democracy and institutions across the Asian continent is examined. Here the book’s editor, Harshan Kumarasingham, discusses how…
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Jan van Zyl Smit: Judicial appointments in the Commonwealth: Is India bucking the trend?
In recent years many Commonwealth states have adopted, or at least debated, reforms to their legal frameworks for the appointment of judges. The stated objectives of such reforms include strengthening the independence of the judiciary, improving its racial and gender diversity, and fostering or enhancing public confidence in the courts. One of the most common…
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Chintan Chandrachud: Debating the NJAC Judgment of the Supreme Court of India: Three Dimensions
Over a week has passed since the Supreme Court of India, in what will most commonly be described as the ‘fourth judges case’, struck down a constitutional amendment and a law enacted by Parliament seeking to reform the process of judicial appointments to the Supreme Court and High Courts. The amendment attempted to replace the…
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Comment on India: Chintan Chandrachud: India’s Deceptive Constitution
Every written constitution is supplemented by important unwritten principles: the constitutional law of all nations (whether or not they have a codified constitution) consists of some combination of the written and unwritten. Judges interpret the abstract language of written constitutions and speak where the text remains silent. As a codified constitution grows older, it forms…
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Farrah Ahmed: The Untapped Potential for Constitutional Avoidance in Social Rights Adjudication
In his 2012 book, Judging Social Rights, Jeff King makes a powerful case for a limited, incrementalist, judicial approach to social rights adjudication. One of the incrementalist strategies King prescribes is constitutional avoidance, that is, ‘where a claim may succeed on constitutional or non-constitutional grounds’, the court should ‘prefer the non-constitutional remedy’. King advocates constitutional…