Law and Social Sciences Research Network: 12/01/2008

12/24/08

LASSnet Inaugural Conference Programme

LAW AND SOCIAL SCIENCES RESEARCH NETWORK (LASSnet), INAUGURAL CONFERENCE
JANUARY 8-11, 2009

Organised by
CENTRE FOR THE STUDY OF LAW AND GOVERNANCE (CSLG),
JAWAHARLAL NEHRU UNIVERSITY, NEW DELHI

Supported by
FORD FOUNDATION &
MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY, HALLE

Thursday, 8th January, 2009
4.30 pm - 7 pm: Opening Plenary
Peregrinations: travelling through law and theory
Venue: School of Social Sciences 1, Auditorium, JNU
Chair: Niraja Gopal Jayal
Panelists:
KG Kannabiran, Reflections On The Life Of Law
Veena Das, Law And Violence: Counter-Narratives From An Anthropological Imagination
Peter Fitzpatrick, The Laws Of Empire
Pratap Bhanu Mehta, On The Nature And Limits Of Judicial Authority
Upendra Baxi, Peregrinations: The Catastrophic Lives Of The ‘Modern’ Law

Friday, 9th January, 2009
9.30 – 10.00 am: Tea @ SSS1 Auditorium
10.00 – 12.00 noon: Plenary
Conversations on Law and Fear
Venue: SSS1 Auditorium
Chair: Julia Eckert
Panelists:
Jean Comaroff, Detective Fictions: Law, Longing, and the Search for Sovereignty in the Postcolony
Veena Das, Law, Fear and the Obligation to Obey: On the Cremation Grounds of Delhi
Comments by: Lawrence Liang & Stewart Motha

12.00 – 1.30 pm: Lunch @ CSLG

1.30 – 3.15 pm: Session 1
1.1 Citizenship and Its Dilemmas 1, @ the Centre for Sanskrit Studies, Seminar Room
Panel Coordinator: Niraja Gopal Jayal
Chair and Discussant: Neera Chandhoke
Panelists:
1. Evelina Dagnino, Disputing Citizenship: the Brazilian experience
2. Shirin M. Rai, Risks and Agency: Dilemmas of Citizenship
3. Ted Svensson, Another Kind of Violence: Rupture and Closure in the Constitution of Citizens
4. Anupama Roy, Unravelling the Aleph: Mapping the Topology of Citizenship in India

1.2 Terror, Law and Bio-politics: Exploring Extraordinariness, 1,
@ the Centre for Sanskrit Studies, Class Room
Panel Coordinators: Ujjwal Kumar Singh and Julia Eckert
Chair and Discussant: Gautam Navlakha
Panelists:
1. Shylashri Shankar, Human Rights and the Medical Jurisprudence of Terror
2. Rubina Saigol, Rule of Law or Law of the Ruler: Black Coats Struggle For An Independent Judiciary
3. Sam Adelman, The Unexceptional Exception: Sovereignty and Biopolitics

1.3 Of Love, Hate and Gossip in the Shadow Worlds of Law
@ the Centre for the Study of Law and Governance, Committee Room
Panel coordinator: Lawrence Liang
Chair And Discussant: Ravi Vasudevan
Panelists:
1. Shohini Ghosh, Cinema and the Fear of Hate
2. Anuj Bhuwania, Mediation and the Impossibility of Justice
3. Lawrence Liang, Kanoon Ke Haath Bahut Lambe Hote Hain
4. Sivamohan Sumathy, Gendered Fictions: Media and the Making of the Malaiyaha Identity

1.4 Dalits and the Law
@ the Centre for the Study of Law and Governance, Seminar Room, First Floor
Panel Coordinator and Chair: Balakrishnan Rajagopal
Panelists:
1. Balakrishnan Rajagopal, Globalizing Caste: The Dalit Movement as a Global Justice Movement
2. Kalpana Kannabiran, Sociology, Law and the Caste System or the Problem of the Crooked Mirror
3. Anupama Rao, Rights, Recognition, Redistribution: Thoughts on Caste and the Juridical
4. Martin Macwan, Looking beyond the law
5. Gopal Guru, Indian Law, If Caught, It Bites, If Left Alone, It Runs Away: On Theorizing Dalit Dilemma

1.5 The Bright Lines and Rhetorics of Intellectual Property, 1,
@ the Centre for the Study of Law and Governance, Classroom, Ground Floor
Panel Coordinators: Brenna Bhandar and Dwijen Rangnekar
Chair and Discussant: graham dutfield
Panelists:
1. Rajshree Chandra Ahuja, ip rights: excluding other rights of other people
2. Rosemary Coombe, Works in Progress: Civilization and its Cultural Others
3. VG Hegde, Towards Regaining Territorial Notions of Creativity in IPRs
4. Dwijen Rangnekar, The Exclusion of Clubs: GIs and the Dilemmas of Collective Action

3.15 pm - 3.45 pm: Tea

3.45 pm – 5.30 pm: Session 2
2.1 Citizenship and Its Dilemmas, 2,
@ the Centre for Sanskrit Studies, Seminar Room
Panel Coordinator: Niraja Gopal Jayal
Chair and Discussant: Manoranjan Mohanty
Panelists:
1. Hester Betlem, Between Victim and Perpetrator: Citizenship, Law and the Devadasi Woman
2. Catalina Smulovitz , Legal Mobilization and Judicialization in Latin America: Political Consequences of a Newly Discovered Tool
3. Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, Secularism and citizenship in India: The View from Literature
4. Niraja Gopal Jayal, In but not Of the State: Social Citizenship in Western India

2.2 Terror, Law and Bio-politics: Exploring Extraordinariness, 2,
@ the Centre for Sanskrit Studies, Classroom
Panel Coordinators: Ujjwal Kumar Singh and Julia Eckert
Chair and Discussant: Bimol Akoijam
Panelists:
1. Julia Eckert, Pota and the Categories of Danger
2. Radhika Singha, ‘Desperate and dangerous': The Bad-livelihood Sections of the Criminal Procedure Code, 1861-1898
3. Ujjwal Kumar Singh, Free and Voluntary? Confessions, the Right to Silence and the Construction of ‘Voluntary’ Truth

2.3 Queer perspectives on the law: Developments since 2006,
@ the Centre for Sanskrit Studies, Classroom
Panel Coordinator and Chair: Arvind Narrain
Discussant: Deepak Mehta
Panelists:
1. Alok Gupta, Keeping the closet doors shut: Shame, Secrecy and Blackmail
2. Mayur Suresh, Possession is 9/10ths of the Body: Law, Land and Hijra Identity
3. Padma Govindan & Aniruddhan Vasudevan, The Razor’s Edge of Oppositionality: Exploring the Politics of Rights-Based Activism by Transgender Women in Tamil Nadu
4. Arvind Narrain, Towards a subaltern queer perspective: Reflections on Law and Society Scholarship in India

2.4 Law, Justice and Politics in South Asia, 1,
@ the Centre for the Study of Law and Governance, Seminar Room, FF
Panel Coordinator: Alex Fischer
Chair and Discussant: Lavanya Rajamani
Panelists:
1. Varun Gauri, A Systematic Examination of Public Interest Litigation in India
2. Susan Visvanathan, The Arunachala Mountainscape Tiruvannamalai, South India: An oral
history inscribed in memoirs, newsletters and court records
3. Rinku Lamba, The State For Women? : An Examination Of The Judicial Discourse Leading Up To The Daniel Latifi Judgment

2.5 Critical Pedagogies
@ Centre for the Study of Law and Governance, Committee Room, FF
Panel Coordinators: Jennifer Beard and Sandhya Pahuja
Chair And Discussant: Kamala Sankaran
Panelists:
1. Jennifer Beard and Sundhya Pahuja, Constituting the Global Legal Subject
2. Jason Keith Fernandes, Requiem for a Dream: The National Law School and the Interpellation of the National Subject
3. Sandipto Dasgupta, The Student before the Law: An Examination of Student Politics in National Law School and the Language of Legal Activism
4. Ponni Arasu, The New Law Schools: Boon or Bane

Saturday, 10th January, 2009
9.30 am – 11.15 am: Session 3

3.1 Labour rights and Livelihoods In Colonial and Contemporary India, 1,
@ the Centre for Sanskrit Studies, Classroom, FF
Panel Coordinators: Prabhu Mohapatra and Kamala Sankaran
Chair and Discussant: Tca Anant
Panelists:
1. Jaivir Singh, Who is a Worker? : Normative Implications for Indian Labour
2. Kamala Sankaran, Legislating for the Self Employed: Have We Reached the Limits of Labour Law?
3. Christian Strümpell, 'Producing Adivasi Workers': Ethnicity And Inequality In Rourkela, Orissa

3.2 Interrogating the Governance of Intimate Violence: Social Movements, State Presences, Legal Processes, 1, @ the CSLG Committee Room, FF
Panel Coordinator: Srimati Basu
Chair and Discussant: Tanika Sarkar
1. Uma Chakravarti, The Law as a Horizon: Challenging Impunity, Pursuing Justice
2. Srila Roy, Sexual violence in/and the Logic of Resistance
3. Flavia Agnes, Who Speaks for the Victim - Movements, Agency, and Legal Provisions
4. Rukmini Sen, Family Endorsing Silenced Affliction and Intervening Sexual Violence: Disjuncture between Legal Rhetoric and Subjectivities of Suffering

3.3 The Bright Lines and Rhetorics of Intellectual Property, 2,
@ the CSLG Classroom, GF
Panel Coordinators: Brenna Bhandar and Dwijen Rangnekar
Chair and Discussant: Kaushik Sunder Rajan
Panelists:
1. Donatella Alessandrini , GMOs and the Crisis of Objectivity: Nature, Science and the Challenge of Uncertainty
2. Brenna Bhandar , Controlling Interests: The Salience of Law in New Regimes of Ownership
3. Graham Dutfield, Who Invents Life: Intelligent Designers, Blind Watchmakers, or Genetic Engineers?

3.4 Mobility and Movement in South Asian Legal History
@ the Centre for Sanskrit Studies, Seminar Room, FF
Panel Coordinator: Renisa Mawani
Chair and Discussant: Aparna Balachandran
Panelists:
1. Binyamin Blum, Doctrines without Borders? The Rejection of the Indian Codes of
Procedure in the Mandates of Iraq and Palestine
2. Kunal Parker, Law and History in the English Utilitarian Imagination of India
3. Renisa Mawani, ‘Habitations of Sovereignty’: Migrations of Legality from British India to the Dominion of Canada
4. Mitra Sharafi, The Marital Patchwork of Colonial South Asia: Forum Shopping from Britain to Baroda
5. Gail Pearson, First Steps in Global Rules: Making the Indian Contract Act

3.5 Law, Justice and Politics in South Asia, 2, @ the CSLG Seminar Room, FF
Panel Coordinator: Alex Fischer
Chair and Discussant: Justice Dr. S. Muralidhar, Delhi High Court
Panelists:
1. Marc Galanter and Alexander Fisher, Competing Equalities after India’s Silent Revolution
2. Ridwanul Hoque , The Recent Emergency and the Politics of the Judiciary in Bangladesh
3. Martin Lau, Constitutionalism in Pakistan: The Musharraf Years
4. Renu Addlakha and Saptarshi Mandal, Pathways to Inclusion: Disability, Law and Social Change

11.15 – 11.30 am: Tea @CSLG and CSS

11.30 am - 1.15 pm : Session 4

4.1 Labour rights and Livelihoods in Colonial and Contemporary India, 2,
@ Centre for Sanskrit Studies, Classroom, FF
Panel Coordinators: Prabhu Mohapatra and Kamala Sankaran
Chair And Discussant: Sabyasachi Bhattacharya
Panelists:
1. Prabhu Mohapatra, A Moving Target: The Worker in the Mirror of Law in Colonial India
2. Aditya Sarkar, Questions of Entitlement: The Tensions of Early Factory Law in India
3. Srinivas Chokkakula, Poetics and Politics of Survival: State and Law in Everyday Lives of Daily Wage Labourers

4.2 Interrogating the Governance of Intimate Violence: Social Movements, State Presences, Legal Processes, 2, @ the CSLG Committee Room, FF
Panel Coordinator: Srimati Basu
Chair And Discussant: Jean Comaroff
Panelists:
1. Srimati Basu, Compensation and Harm, Violence and Intimacy in the Staging of Rape and Divorce Cases
2. Pratiksha Baxi, The Hostile Witness and Public Secrecy in Rape Trials in India
3. Shaheen Sardar Ali , Let the Field Speak: Law’s Violence and Narrative of the ‘invisible’
4. Vasudha Nagaraj, Adjudicating Illness and Capacity : Notes from a Custody Trial

4.3 Law’s Violence, @ the Centre for Sanskrit Studies, Seminar Room, FF
Panel Coordinator: Bikram Jeet Batra
Chair and Discussant: Veena Das
Panelists:
1. Mayur R. Suresh, Law like Love: Living in the Place of Law’s Devastation
2. Priya Thangarajah, Kanamalponor, Athurudhanovan (those who are lost), Disappearances: Memory and the disappeared body in Sri Lanka
3. S. Vivek and Kalyani Ramnath, Rumour Has It
4. Bikram Jeet Batra, Playing God? Decision Making on Mercy Petitions in India
5. David T Johnson, State Killing in Asia: On the Relationship between Judicial and Extra-Judicial Executions

4.4 Water Law Reforms in India: An Analysis, @ the CSLG Classroom, GF
Panel Coordinator: Philippe Cullet
Chair and Discussant: Navroz K Dubash
Panelists:
1. Usha Ramanathan, Eminent Domain, Sovereignty and Water
2. Philippe Cullet , Water Law Reforms, Access to Drinking Water and the Human Right to Water
3. Sujith Koonan, Groundwater: An Analysis of Legal Reforms in India
4. Shripad Dharmadhikary, Groundwater: Water Sector Reforms in India: Privatisation and Public Resistance

4.5 Political Theologies and the Postcolonial State, @ the CSLG Seminar Room, FF
Panel Coordinator: Stewart Motha
Chair: Kalpana Kannabiran
Discussant: Stewart Motha
Panelists:
1. Peter Fitzpatrick, Legal Theology: Law, Modernity and the Sacred
2. Manas Ray, Talal Asad and the Critique of Liberal Secularism
3. Deepak Mehta, Words that wound: Archiving hate in the making of Hindu and Muslim publics in Bombay

1.15 pm – 2.15 pm: LUNCH

2.15 pm - 4 pm: Session 5
5.1 Transition and Transformation: Law, Politics, and the State, 1942-52,
@ the Centre for Sanskrit Studies, Seminar Room, FF
Panel Coordinator: Arudra Burra
Chair and Discussant: Pratap Bhanu Mehta
Panelists:
1. Rohit De, Judges, Nationalists and The Colonial State in South Asia: Courts And the Quit India Movement, 1942
2. Rebecca Grapevine, Ambedkar, Moderated: Dr. Bhim Rao Ambedkar in the Indian Constituent Assembly, 1946-19510
3. Arudra Burra, Arguments from Colonial Continuity: The Constitution (First Amendment) Act, 1951
4. Devika Sethi, The Censored Turns Censor: Press Censorship in India in the First Decade after Independence
5. Hans Dembowski, Academic Freedom Only For The Online Avatar?: Calcutta High Court Puts Limits on Sociological Debate

5.2 Contesting Notions Of The Community In State And Non-State Law
@ the Centre for Sanskrit Studies, Class Room, FF
Panel Coordinator: Rinku Lamba
Chair And Discussant: Susan Visvanathan
Panelists:
1. Mekhala Krishnamurthy, Between ‘Community’ And ‘State’: An Ethnographic Glimpse Of Nari Adalats In Rural Gujarat
2. A. Suneetha, Dispute Resolution among Muslims in Hyderabad: Mufti as a 'Juridical' Figure
3. Malavika Kasturi, Legal Engagements And ‘Shared’ Sacred Space: Debates Over The
Bodh Gaya Temple Bills, 1915-1950

5.3 Bodies In Law
@ the Centre for the Study of Law and Governance, Classroom, GF
Panel Coordinators: Shrimoyee Nandini Ghosh And Namita A. Malhotra
Chair and Discussant: Mary John
Panelists:
1. Mayur R. Suresh, Pendulous Penises And Couture Clitorises: What Medical Men Do To Intersex Infants
2. Namita A. Malhotra, The Curious Disappearance Of The Orgy Of Bodies: A Legal Mystery
3. Nitya Vasudevan, When The Spots Appear: A Rethink Of Oppositions In Sexuality Politics
4. Shrimoyee Nandini Ghosh , The Unvictimlike Body Of The Dance Bar Girl

5.4 The Germinal Contribution Of J.M. Duncan Derrett To The Study Of South Asian Comparative Law And Social Change
@ the CSLG Seminar Room, FF
Chair And Panel Coordinator: Upendra Baxi
Panelists:
1. Werner Menski, Situating Duncan Derrett In The Landscape Of Postmodern Hindu And Indian Law
2. Oliver Mendelsohn, Professor Derrett, Indian Marriage, And The Proponents Of A Uniform Civil Code: Whose Is The "Progressive" Position?
3. Vasudha Dhagamwar, Two Cheers for the UCC, None for Other Options: Professor JDM Derrett on Codification and Code - Hindu or Uniform
4. Alex Fischer, Revisiting Derrett’s “Death of a Marriage Law” – The Living Dead Or Avatars Of Hindu Law?
5. Upendra Baxi, Duncan Derrett And The Comparative Method

5.5 Normality Of Custodial Violence: Collusive Strategies Of Policing Desires, 1, @ the CSLG Committee Room, FF
Chair and Panel Coordinator: Uma Chakravarti
Panelists:
1. Sara Hossain, Protecting Our Bodies, But Respecting Our Choices
2. Usha Ramanathan, Restoration And Return: The Silent Questions
3. Niti Saxena, Custodians And Guardians: Examining The 'Protective' Face Of State, Family And Community
4. Perveez Mody, The Construction Of Marital Rights In Delhi

4 - 4.30 pm: Tea @ SSS1

4. 30 pm 0 6.30 pm: Plenary 3
Law’s Technologies: Critical enquires into the Domains of Science, Capital, and Regulation
@ the SSS1 Auditorium
Chair: Brenna Bhandar
Panelists:
Suman Sahai, Ownership and Regulation of Transformative Technologies
Rosemary coombe, Intellectual Property and its Cultures: Informational Capital and Cultural Resources in a Neoliberal Era
Kaushik Sunder Rajan, Intellectual Property, Pharmaceutical Logics, and Ideologies of Innovation
Sheila Jassanoff, Natural or Naturalizing? – Law and Knowledge in a Constitutional Moment

Sunday, 11th January, 2009
10.00-11.45 am: Session 6
6.1 Gender, Law And Agrarian Relations: Panel In Honour Of Jayoti Gupta, @ the CSLG Classroom, GF
Panel Coordinator: Brenna Bhandar
Chair And Discussant: Rajni Palriwala
Panelists:
1. Utsa Patnaik, A Comment On Jayoti Gupta's Early Work
2. Anand Chakravarti, The State, The Law, And The Agrarian Underclass In India
3. Kumkum Sangari, The Gendered Economies of Law and Labour
4. Glimpses Of Jayoti Gupta's Work: Video Extracts (A Compilation Of 15 Mins) will be screened. All the films have been Directed/Produced by Manjira Datta.
5. Brenna Bhandar, Comment on Seeds of Plenty, Seeds of Sorrow

6.2 Property Rights, Labour, And Displacement
@ the CSS Classroom, First Floor
Panel Coordinator: Karine Bates
Chair and Discussant: Dipankar Gupta
Panelists:
1. Karine Bates, An Anthropological Study Of Women’s Property Rights And Access To Justice In India
2. Rajendra Pradhan, Legal Fields, Inheritance And Family: Negotiating The Meaning Of 'Property' In The Netherlands
3. Ahilan Kadirgamar, Post-Coloniality, Armed Conflicts And The Vicissitudes Of The Question Of Land In Sri Lanka

6.3 Independent Regulatory Agencies In India: Origins, Politics And Practice
@ the CSLG Seminar Room, FF
Panel Coordinator: Navroz K Dubash
Chair and Discussant: Partha Mukhopadhyay
Panelists:
1. Tca Anant And Jaivir Singh, Indian Regulatory Bodies And The Social Costs Of Unbalanced Delegation
2. Sudhir Krishnaswamy, Regulation, Law And Governance
3. Rajat Kathuria, Does Regulation Matter? A Case Study Of Indian Telecom
4. Navroz K. Dubash, Regulation As Politics: How Indian Electricity Regulators Re-Institutionalize The Politics of Power

6.4 Assessing The 'Conservative Shift' In The Indian Supreme Court's 'PIL' Jurisprudence
@ the Centre for Sanskrit Studies, Seminar Room, FF
Panel Coordinator: Siddharth Narrain
Chair And Discussant: Sitharam Kakarala
Panelists:
1. Anuj Bhuwania, Public Interest Litigation: The Thing Itself
2. Siddharth Narrain and Prashant Iyengar, Courting Development: The Appellate Judiciary And Large Developmental Projects In The Nineties
3. Sruti Chaganti, More Than The Sum Of Its Parts: The Constitution In The Judicial Nineties
4. Arun K. Thiruvengadam, A Complex And Fluid Dynamic: Analysing The Relationship Between Social Movements and The Judiciary In India

6.5 Normality Of Custodial Violence: Collusive Strategies Of Policing Desires, 2,
@ th CSLG Committee Room, FF
Panel Coordinator: Uma Chakravarti
Chair And Discussant: Sara Hossain
Panelists:
1. Aisha Gill, “Honour”- Based Crimes And Violence Against Women In The UK
2. Shaheen Sardar Ali, ‘Fractured Modernities’, Politics Of Parallel Judicial Systems And Women’s Human Rights: A Case Study Of The North West Frontier Province Of Pakistan
3. Nighat Said Khan, Still In The Closet: Human And Women's Rights Responses To Sexualities, Gender and The Other
4. Priya Thangarajah And Ponni Arasu, Queer Women and the Law in India: The Writ of Habeas Corpus

11.45 -12.15 pm: Tea

12.15 - 2 pm: Session 7
7.1 Competing Images of Law, Regulation and Rights
@ the Centre for Sanskrit Studies, Classroom, FF
Panel Coordinator: Anusha Hariharan
Chair and Discussant: Usha Ramanathan
Panelists:
1. U C Jha, South Asian Military Legal Systems: Implementation of the International Human Rights Law
2. Anusha Hariharan, Analyzing Vishakha
3. Dania Thomas, Where have all the Women Gone? Rights, Private Ordering and the Economics of Sex-selective Abortions
4. Sangeeta Udgaonkar, India’s Regulations on Embryonic Stem Cell Technology

7.2 Learning from Gujarat 2002: Scope of the Criminal Justice System to address Mass Crimes
@ the Centre for Sanskrit Studies, Seminar Room, FF
Panel Coordinator: Anita Abraham
Chair and Discussant: Vrinda Grover
Panelists:
1. Vrinda Grover, Challenging Regimes Of Immunity And Violence: What Can We Learn From International Law And Criminal Jurisprudence?
2. Arvind Narrain, Global Justice in the era of the War against Terror: Learning from Gujarat 2002
3. Anita Abraham and Prita Jha, Interrogating Mass Violence And Mass Impunity
4. Mukul Sinha, Statutory Prevarication: Commission or Omission?
5. Indira Jaising , The Law Of Sovereign Immunity: A Critique [tentative title]

7.3 The Bright Lines and Rhetorics of Intellectual Property, 3,
@ the CSLG Classroom, GF
Panel Coordinators: Brenna Bhandar and Dwijen Rangnekar
Chair and Discussant: Rosemary Coombe
Panelists:
1. Lawrence Liang, Meet John Doe's Order: Piracy, Temporality and the Question of Asia
2. Nandan Nawn, Political Economy of Music Copyright: Challenges from Recent Technological Developments and the Survival of the Justificatory Rhetoric
3. BS Chimni, TWAIL Perspectives On “The Bright Lines And Rhetorics Of Intellectual Property”: A Comment

7.4 Rethinking the Regulation of Sex Work-Reflections on the Indian Sex Work Debates
@ the CSLG Committee Room, FF
Panel Coordinator: Prabha Kotiswaran
Chair and Discussant: Rajeswari Sunder Rajan
Panelists:
1. Svati P. Shah , Sex Work, Criminalization, and Biopolitics in the Informal Sector
2. Ashwini Tambe, Moral Panics Compared: Moments in the History of Colonial Prostitution Laws
3. Prabha Kotiswaran, Born unto Brothels: Towards a Legal Realist Ethnography of Sonagachi’s Sex Industry
4. Ashwini Sukthankar, Activist engagements with sex workers in India (and vice versa)

7.5 Conversations On Empire and Law
@ the CSLG Seminar Room, FF
Panel Coordinator: Ratna Kapur
Chair And Discussant: Nivedita Menon
Panelists:
1. Ratna Kapur, Human Rights: The Liberal Ruse of Power
2. Vasuki Nesaih, Delimiting Accountability: Writing History Out Of Transitional Justice
3. Peter Fitzpatrick, Interjections On Empire And Law

2 - 3.30 pm: LUNCH @CSLG

3. 30 - 4.30 pm: LASSnet - Mapping the Future
@ the CSLG Seminar Room
Moderated by: Pratiksha Baxi

Venue Information at a glance:
- All 3 Plenaries and the Closing will be held at the School of Social Sciences 1, Auditorium, JNU
- 3 Parallel Streams in each session will be held at the Centre for the Study of Law and Governance (CSLG). In each panel, 2 parallel streams will be held in the Centre for Sanskrit Studies (CSS) next to the CSLG venue.
Please note that there are 35 panels i.e., 7 sessions and 5 parallel streams in all.

lassnet@gmail.com
Abstracts are hosted on www. lassnet.org

THE IDEA OF LASSnet

The Centre for the Study of Law and Governance at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi initiated the establishment of the "Law and Social Sciences Research Network" in order to bring together scholars, lawyers and doctoral researchers engaged in research and teaching of issues of law across social sciences in contemporary South Asian contexts. We believed that the critical work that has emerged from different institutional locations and theoretical frameworks has yet to find a common forum which can act as a medium for exchange of ideas, work, materials, pedagogies and aspirations for the way law, regulation and society as objects of research as well as sites of praxis have been envisaged variously. The attempt of this network is to create a forum for academics, researchers, and lawyers to interact with each other to find productive conversations and enhance these into future directions that law and social sciences scholarship in India might mature into.

LASSnet seeks to organise a network conference every 2-3 years to collaborate on specific themes with institutions in South Asia. So far we have organised 4 network conferences in Delhi and Pune in India and one conference in Sri Lanka. Here at LASSnet, we hope to take the idea of publishing a series of volumes on these themes seriously as well as initiating reading groups/work in progress meetings. We also wish to disseminate teaching materials, design syllabi and share pedagogic experiences.

Since 2021, LASSnet anchored at CSLG, JNU, in collaboration with the Centre for Asian Legal Studies (CALS) SOAS, and Centre for Law and Humanities, JGLS has been organizing a regular webinar series involving book discussions, panel discussions and guest lectures. We hope to continue our interactions and engagements as we work to bring together ideas and activities for the future.

We would be delighted if you were to send us names and emails of those you think might want to join this network. We hope that people will also share their work, ideas or relevant announcements, if any, on the network. If you would like to be part of LASSnet, please send your contact details and short bio to lassnet@gmail.com

Watch this space for more!

LAW AND SOCIAL SCIENCES IN SOUTH ASIA

Inaugural Conference

was held on

January 9-11, 2009

at

Centre for the Study of Law and Governance,

Jawaharlal Nehru University

New Delhi, India

We began by noting that law is conventionally taught and practiced, in South Asia (though not only there) by treating it as an autonomous and self-sufficient phenomenon. The doctrinal researchers regard law as autonomous and believe it is capable of giving an account of itself. The law also tends to be narrowly conceived as what judges, legislators, or the police ‘do’ – ignoring the diffuse structures of power and governance, and practices of regulation, normalisation, and biopolitics that penetrate bodies and condition behaviour.

The notion that law is autonomous (legal formalism or legal positivism) has been subjected to sustained challenge over many decades by scholars who draw on social science methodologies, as well as by the law and literature movement, and by activists who constantly challenge the positivist image of law. Broadly conceived, these scholars seek to explain law as a social, anthropological, historical, and economic artefact which should be understood and studied as such. This implies also that we trace the genealogies of categories which inform law, and the images and imaginings of law in contemporary social science theory. All this suggests that the law is not confined to state law or the appellate judiciary. Not only it remains a fact that state law remains inherently plural; it interacts with plural regimes of customariness. We wish to understand how forms of state and non-state law mutually constitute each other and how they relate to different structures of power and techniques of violence.

Methods and techniques drawn from the social sciences are central to understanding the market, legal structures, regulation and statecraft in the era of globalisation. In mapping the field of law and social sciences, we interrogate the place of law and economics in the larger context of the scripting of the transformation of legal and regulatory regimes. We recognise that while regulation has emerged as a field in conversation with the discipline of economics, there is very little work which details the intersection of regulation with law. Moreover, the conversations between regulators and lawyers do not seem to be informed by social science frameworks and methodologies. The Law and Social Sciences Network (LASS) reflects the interests of those scholars who wish to engage with interdisciplinary research on the transformation of legal and regulatory regimes from varying empirical and theoretical viewpoints.

LASS recognises that much scholarship informed by the social sciences in South Asia has been engaged with social movements and forms of activism which have challenged law’s power to deny, censor, hurt, humiliate and kill. The engagement with this politics of hurt has led to many passionate debates about the place of law in our work and in our politics. Yet in South Asia, the research, teaching and practice of law that draws on the social sciences has been relegated to the margins, and radical activist engagement with law devalued by official discourses of judicial reform. LASS invites reflexive engagements from scholars and activists about the relationship between law and social movements.

The Law and Social Sciences Network (LASS) was constituted to map the field of Law and Social Sciences in South Asia. Its objective is to bring together academics, lawyers and researchers engaged in innovative legal research in South Asia which employs social science methodologies. Building on existing conversations, LASS hopes to stimulate the development of further research into the links between knowledge production, techniques of government, and the ever transforming interdependencies of power, law, and resistance. LASS promotes an examination of how law and/or regulation is constituted as an object of study, and an interrogation of the conditions of its truth claims.

LASS may or may not necessarily inhabit the intellectual and political zones of comfort or of distress created by the habitus of postmodern jurisprudence. We invite critical engagement with the global travels of mainstream networks of Law and Economics, Law and Society or Critical Legal Studies, by providing a sustained critique of the fascination of progressive Eurocentric scholarship for South Asian law, economy and society studies.

LASS may equally turn its attention to the precious and precocious critiques of the “dark side of [European] modernity” which rarely attend to the histories of colonization and the Cold War as these have affected South Asia

We remain sensitive to the fact that the very expression ‘South Asia’ embodies forms of epistemic geopolitical imperialism. LASS remains particularly anxious concerning this essentialization of identity and by the same token resists its translation into an “area studies”. Further, it needs saying that some new geopolitics is now in the making. LASS thus calls for an appreciation of the histories of diversity and plurality, within which inescapably new traditions of law/society/humanities tradition of discourse may be further re-imagined. What purchase this may constitute for the tradition of the distinctive European post-Enlightenment critical legal studies tradition is an important thematic inviting further dialogical/discursive fellowships of juristic learning.

These methodological challenges are suggested with a view to inviting their further elaboration. Contributors should be mindful of these methodological concerns as they address issues in the following more specific settings. In particular, papers, panels, and presentations were invited on:

1. CONSTITUTIONALISM, REFORM AND RESISTANCE

· Constitutionalism, rights and regulation. Has the discourse on constitutionalism met new challenges in relation to changing statecraft, international law, or human rights in South Asia? How does regulation intersect with rights discourses? How do pictures of the written and unwritten scripts of constitutional law circulate in different sites of law and life?

· Languages of Power and of Resistance. What literary and visual representations of the law and resistance to law exist in the South Asian region? In what ways, the 'poetics' tend to subvert politics? Herein we signal the problematic of the multiplicity of the official languages and the politics of translation. How does the politics of resistance constitute the fields of law, creativity and collective action? What are the trajectories that turn the public domain inside out and force new sensibilities and new paradigms that foreground a different understanding of “justice”?

· The politics of law and judicial reform. What is the politics of law and judicial reform? How are histories of such reform to be archived and evaluated? How do different forms of representations [such as the media or those emanating from social movements] engage with projects of law reform? Do contemporary engagements with reform and resistance benefit with tracing the genealogy of categories, and discursive shifts which create new forms of subjection and subjectivities?

· Colonial and Postcolonial Imaginations of the Law: The challenges by legal historians and postcolonial theorists in thinking through law and social forms have led to a rich body of literature on law and society in South Asian contexts. We invite contributions interrogating colonial as well as neo-imperial formations of law, governance, and regulation. This panel retains an interest in the contestations on law’s past as these relate to the constitution of the nation-state, and reflections on the impact of history in the reconstitution of law as an object of study.

2. THE BODY, TECHNIQUES OF GOVERNANCE AND REGULATORY POWER

· The practices of governance in relation to environment, health and sexuality. What are the processes of govermentality which sanitise, medicalise or pathologise some forms of life? What form of regulatory power inhabits the constitution of waste and how does it participate in the formation of public aesthetics? How is the body encountered in public or administrative law? Is gender/sexual orientation/disability a site of recognition that allows us to critique the manifold elisions in the body of the law?

· Technology, Life and the Law. The relationship between science, technology, the body and resources are mediated by the state-corporation alliances in a globalised era. What are the ways in which we may interrogate the deployment of technology to control bodies and life forms, and the regulation of both life and technology through law?

· Technosciences, Environment, Risk and Regulation: How have human rights and social movement discourses pursued this relationship? What images of a ‘risk society’ remain constitutionally legitimate? Are these ideas revisited in the context of the environmental contemporary discourses, such as the global discourse on climate change?

3. PROPERTY, LABOUR, DISPLACEMENT

· Property in different domains of law and life. What are the new challenges faced today in thinking through property rights and discourses? What are some new forms of property emerging through new phases of economic reform? What futures one may envisage for agrarian reforms? What kinds if new property stand invested, particularly in relation to the changing regimes of intellectual property rights in South Asia?

· Labour rights, livelihoods and mass displacement of peoples in contemporary contexts of globalisation. What is the relationship between law and regimes of impoverishment in South Asia? In particular, how may globalization affect constitutionally mandated visions of development as most benefiting the worst-off peoples? As concerns worker’s rights, what legacies may we derive from the histories and narratives of working class movements in South Asia? How may we ‘read’ these alongside with the globalization–induced programs aimed at creation of ‘flexible labour markets’?

4. VIOLENCE AND SUFFERING

· Social suffering and political violence. This has multiple dimensions not fully exhausted by the figure of the detainee, torture and disappearance; forms of collective violence and atrocities in everyday and collective contexts; and the modalities of capital punishment and custodial violence have elicited critical research. How is the everyday conceptualised in these contexts? Beyond, and related to this, remains the question of the reproduction of foundational violence of the law. This emerges of course in the context of India-Pakistan partition; yet it also emerges equally fiercely, for example, in Afghanistan, the erstwhile Tibet, and Burma. This conference invites full attention to the postcolonial ‘nacropolitics’ (to deploy here the phrase-regime of Mbembe).

· Terror, Law and Biopolitics: What is the relation between terror, law and bio-politics? Or what would constitute the jurisprudence of emergency or exception in South Asia today? Put another way, we need to explore fully the law-society relationship between the pre and post 9/11 forms of wars of, and wars against ‘terror.’ How may have the South Asian studies tradition, at all, addressed ‘terror?’

· Movements of autonomy and secession: The South Asian experience remains marked by constitutional and ‘extra’-constitutional insurgencies. How has the construction of the political been conceptualized and narrated in law and society studies tradition in the ‘region?’ How does militarization of protest and of governance proceed to reproduce new forms of ‘bare life?’

Instructions for Submission of Papers

The Steering Group particularly welcomed the submission of pre-formed panel proposals. Individual proposals were welcome, as were proposals for full panels. Papers were also considered on any related theme.

500 word abstracts weresubmitted no later than 15th June, 2008. 500 word abstracts were submitted to Pratiksha Baxi at lassnet@gmail.com; abstracts were in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats, following this order: author(s), affiliation, email address, title of abstract, body of abstract. We got back to you within 8 weeks. If an abstract was accepted for the conference, a full draft paper was submitted to the conference secretariat and distributed to the discussant and fellow panel members no later than 01 December 2008.

The maximum duration of individual presentations within each panel was 20 minutes. The abstracts are hosted at http://www.lassnet.org/