Guest Post by Kalyani Ramnath Manu Bhagavan’s ‘The Peacemakers: India and the Quest for One World’ provides a compelling account of India’s engagement with international institutions from the 1940s to the 1960s. The title …
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Tag: Indian Constitutional and Legal History
Oral History of the Constitution
Journalist, blogger and writer Sidin Vadukut has a series of podcasts on the oral history of the Indian constitution, beginning with the reforms of 1858. It’s informative, fun and accessible. Constitutions have for too long been the preserve …
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Land Disputes, Gender and Legal History
I just wanted to flag a number of new articles that raise interesting questions that are directly relevant to our discussions on Law and Other Things. Nivedita Menon, in the recent issue of the EPW, …
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Legal History Moment: Colonial Law and CIA Agents
Elizabeth Kolsky, whose pathbreaking book we reviewed here has written an opinion piece in the DAWN, highlighting how the Raymond Davis case follows a pattern established in colonial India where white men in South Asia …
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Alibi’s of Empire
Karuna Mantena‘s first book, Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism joins a growing conversation around the British codification of law in India. Mantena, a political theorist by training, is interesting …
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The Rule of Law in Colonial India
Elizabeth Kolsky‘s, Colonial Justice in British India: White Violence and the Rule of Law recently published by Cambridge University Press is a significant intervention into understanding how criminal law comes to operate in India. Kolsky …
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Bar Exams, Reinventing the Wheel
While researching at the British Library this week, I stumbled across a Memorandum on the administration of justice in India by Sir Patrick Spens, Chief Justice of the Federal Court of India. Spens noted, I …
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Legal History Moment: The Case of the Diligent Diplomat
C.B Muthamma passed away today. She was the first woman to have joined the Indian civil service in 1949. She became a part of Indian legal history when she challenged the Foreign Service Rules which …
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Constituting Jinnah- I
The 61st anniversary of Mohammad Ali Jinnah’s death anniversary would be a good opportunity to revisit the certain aspects of the controversy set off in Jaswant Singh’s book. As Srinivasan Venkataraman points out in his …
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Relations between Dr. Ambedkar and the Congress — The Constituent Assembly and Beyond
Yesterday, at an election rally in New Delhi, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mayawati accused the Congress party of mistreating Dr. B.R. Ambedkar and ensuring his defeat in the first general elections. A similar allegation was …
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