As 2020 comes to a close, the Law and Other Things team wishes all our readers a very Happy New Year! We look forward to continued engagement with our readers over interesting developments and debates in public law through 2021!
Below, we are pleased to bring you an update on the blog’s activities over the month of December.
Blog Posts
As part of our series marking 15 years of Law and Other Things, our Senior Editor Malavika Prasad authored a piece titled Some Reflections on What the State is doing with our Time, examining state action through the lens of time. She relied on Elizabeth Cohen’s The Political Value of Time to show how seemingly harmless calendrical changes reveal insights into state power.
To kick off a series of explainers on the new Labour Codes passed by the Parliament in September 2020, our reporter Chitranksha Kumari brought you an explainer on the Industrial Relations Code. Mariyam Mayan also authored an explainer on the new land regime in Jammu and Kashmir.
To mark one year since the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019 was passed, we released the transcript of the panel on Citizenship, Residency and the Constitution held during The Courts and the Constitution Conference, 2020, organised by NALSAR University of Law, Hyderabad in collaboration with Law and Other Things and Azim Premji University.
New Scholarship
In our New Scholarship section, we bring to you recently published scholarship in the area of Public Law as well as exciting debates on some of these publications.
This month we concluded the book discussion on Jeffrey Redding’s book A Secular Need: Islamic Law and State Governance in Contemporary India, moderated by Prof. Rohit De, with Prof. Redding’s response to the reviews by Shahrukh Alam (Advocate, Supreme Court of India) (Part I, Part II), Arif A. Jamal (National University of Singapore), Farzana Haniffa (University of Colombo) and Shaunna Rodrigues (Columbia University).
We continued our discussion on Issue 2 of Volume 4 of the Indian Law Review, indexed here, with Dierdre N. Dlugoleski’s article titled Undoing historical injustice: the role of the Forest Rights Act and the Supreme Court in departing from colonial forest laws, introduced here. Following CR Bijoy’s response, we published a response from Shalini Iyengar in which she focuses on the link between public protests and environmental law-making, and the relationship between human rights and environment.
We also kicked off a series on India & Global Decline in Democracies as part of our 15 Year Series featuring many renowned public law scholars, indexed here. Starting with the round-table on Prof. Tarunabh Khaitan’s article “Killing a Constitution with a Thousand Cuts: Executive Aggrandizement and Party-State Fusion in India”, we published Prof. Khaitan’s introduction. This was followed by a response from Prof. Tom Daly (Melbourne School of Govt.) titled Giving Form to a Shapeless Threat: Tarun Khaitan’s Work on Democratic Decay in India, and a response from Prof. Rivka Weill (Radzyner School of Law), titled Can the Judiciary Guard Democratic Transitions of Power? An Indian-Israeli Perspective.
The upcoming discussion in the round-table shall feature posts from Mark Tushnet (Harvard Law School), Mark Graber (Yale), Kim L. Scheppele (Princeton), Gabor Halmai (European University Institute), Dinesha Samararatne (Melbourne University/University of Colombo) and Samuel Issacharoff (New York University).
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