In February 2021, Law and Other Things published a series of interesting articles & discussions on a range of issues. We are pleased to bring you an update on the blog’s activities over the month of February below.

Blog Posts

We started off with a two-part piece by Taha Bin Tasneem and Afif Khan titled Is the Anti Conversation Law Necessary? What Do the Numbers Say? (Part I & Part II). They conducted a study of relevant judgements decided between 2010-2019 by the Allahabad High Court on this issue to argue against the need of this ordinance. This was followed by the piece titled Inheritance rights at bay: The story of Kashmiri half-widows written by Shantanu Mishra. After explaining the plight of half-widows, he argued in favour of legislative and judicial recognition of the enforced disappearances of Kashmiri men, and its impact of half-widows and their rights. We also had Prakhar Raghuvanshi and Sarthak Bhardwaj, who wrote a piece titled Reforming the Roster: Looking Beyond the Borders, in which they surveyed the systems of allocation of cases in courts of five major judicial systems of the world, to argue in favour of adoption of a system similar to that of Germany.

Continuing the series of explainers on the new Labour Codes passed by the Parliament in September 2020, our reporter Mariyam Mayan penned an explainer on the Occupational Safety Health and Working Conditions Code, 2020, highlighting its key features and issues. Another one of our reporters Shravani Shendye brought another explainer to you titled the Regulatory Framework for COVID-19 vaccine, in which she simplified the legal compliances required for this process while also analysing recent developments in this arena.

 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.

February marked the conclusion of our symposium on India & Global Decline in Democracies as a part of our 15 Year Series. This round-table discussed Prof. Tarunabh Khaitan’s article “Killing a Constitution with a Thousand Cuts: Executive Aggrandizement and Party-State Fusion in India”. We published the last response piece in the symposium, by Prof. Mark Graber. In his piece titled We have met the enemy and he is us: Thoughts inspired by Tarunabh Khaitan’s “Killing a constitution with thousand cuts”. Prof. Graber drew upon Prof. Khaitan’s framework to observe the similarities and differences between democratic decline in India & the USA. He also expressed his thoughts on right-wing populism’s interaction with democracies around the world.  

We ended the symposium with Prof. Khaitan’s final response to the various response pieces through his piece titled Killing A Constitution With A Thousand Cuts: A Response to the Symposium Blogs. He wrote about his systematic approach towards democratic downfall, constitutional studies versus constitutional law, and the politics of scholarship.

Previously, we published Prof. Khaitan’s introduction and responses from following people –  

• Tom Daly (Melbourne School of Govt.) (here),
• Rivka Weill (Radzyner School of Law) (here),
• Prof. Samuel Issacharoff (New York University) (here),
• Dinesha Samararatne (Melbourne University/University of Colombo) (here),
• Gabor Halmai (European University Institute) (here)
• Mark Tushnet (Harvard Law School) (here),
• Kim L. Scheppele (Princeton) (here).

Regretfully, we also witnessed the sudden demise of Dr. Shirish Deshpande, who taught at various National Law Schools of the country. Dr. Sanjay Jain penned a condolence for him. On behalf of Law and Other Things blog, we offer deepest condolences to his family and pray that his soul rests in peace.