Law and Social Sciences Research Network

10/10/08

Asha Bajpai

Asha Bajpai is a law teacher at the Centre for Socio Legal Studies and Human Rights, Tata Institute of Social Sciences [TISS, Bombay]. She teaches and researches "law and social work", and "law and development".

Rachita Bansal

I finished the 5yr law course from Symbiosis Law College, Poona in 2005 after which I pursued Masters in Law from University of Warwick (International Economic Law). I worked as a corporate lawyer in Bombay for Kochhar and Co. for one year and have been now working in Delhi for Ms. Indira Jaising for the past 5 months. I handle all her public interest litigation in various High Courts and the Supreme Court. I worked on the recent writ petition against the stay of the smoke-free rules and was the counsel for the anti tobacco NGOs. I read voraciously and I'm interested in being associated with LASSNET.

Dr. Dina M. Siddiqi

Dr. Dina M. Siddiqi is a cultural anthropologist with a strong interest in gender, human rights and transnational feminist politics. She is a South Asia specialist, with particular expertise on gender and Islam in Bangladesh. Her research and publications concern globalization and human rights, non-state dispute resolution systems, and the cultural politics of Islam. Dr. Siddiqi has worked for leading human rights organizations in Bangladesh including Ain o Salish Kendra, and has been a consultant for UNDP, UNICEF and the Royal Norwegian Embassy in Dhaka. She teaches anthropology and gender studies on a part-time basis in the United States. Dr. Siddiqi was Senior Research Associate at the Alice Paul Center for the Study of Women, Gender and Sexuality at the University of Pennsylvania from 2004-2007 and a Research Fellow at the Centre for Policy Dialogue, Dhaka in 2002. She is currently a core resource person and adjunct faculty member at the Centre for Gender, Sexuality and HIV/AIDS at the James P. Grant School of Public Health, BRAC University, Dhaka. She is part of the Core Advisory Group of the South Asian Network of Gender Activists and Trainers (SANGAT) and a member of the Coalition for Sexual and Bodily Rights in Muslim Societies (CSBR).

10/6/08

South Asian Legal Studies Workshop in Madison, Wisconsin

Dear All,

The South Asian Legal Studies Pre-conference Workshop will be taking place in Madison, USA on Thursday, Oct.16, 2008:

http://southasiaconference.wisc.edu/preconference.html#4

The workshop will immediately precede the larger 37th Annual Conference on South Asia in Madison:
http://southasiaconference.wisc.edu/

The workshop will consist of two plenary panels running 2-6pm, followed by a workshop dinner. All events will be held in Lubar Common (room 7200), University of Wisconsin Law School, 975 Bascom Mall, Madison: http://www.map.wisc.edu/

If you would like to attend (and have not already RSVPed), please e-mail me (sharafi@wisc.edu) by Friday, Oct.3 with your affiliation and contact details. Unfortunately, we are unable to offer travel funding for attendees.

Best wishes,
Mitra Sharafi (UW-Madison)

Call for Papers

3rd Global Conference
Evil, Law and the State

Friday 13th March - Sunday 15th March 2009
Salzburg, Austria

Call for Papers
This inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary
conference will explore issues surrounding evil
and law, with a focus on state power and violence.
Perspectives are sought from those engaged in any
field relevant to the study of law and legal
culture: anthropology, criminology, cultural
studies, government/politics, history, legal
studies, literature, philosophy, psychology,
religion/theology, and sociology, as well as those
working in civil rights, human rights, prison
services, politics and government (including
NGOs), psychiatry, healthcare, and other areas.

Papers, reports, work-in-progress and workshops
are invited on issues
related to the following themes:

* when and why is law evil or a source of evil?
* state violence and coercion
* enforcement of criminal law and other legal
prohibitions
* law, citizenship, and political identity
* justifications for punishment, including capital
punishment
* whether and under what circumstances the
adversary or inquisitorial models of legal process
generate, tolerate, or allow evil outcomes
* issues of equality and distributive justice in law
* the consequences of legal error
* the intersection of law with issues of choice,
responsibility, and diminished responsibility
* state responsibility for terrorism, war,
intervention, ethnic cleansing, and other problems
of international law and international relations

Papers on any other topic related to the theme
will also be considered. 500 word abstracts should
be submitted by Friday 3rd October 2008. The
abstract will be double blind peer reviewed (where
appropriate). If an abstract is accepted for the
conference, a full draft paper should be
submitted by Friday 6th February 2009.

500 word abstracts should be submitted to both
Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word,
WordPerfect, or RTF formats, following this order:

a) author(s), b) affiliation, c) email address, d)
title of abstract, e) body of abstract

We acknowledge receipt and answer to all paper
proposals submitted. If you do not receive a reply
from us in a week you should assume we did
not receive your proposal; it might be lost in
cyberspace! We suggest, then, to look for an
alternative electronic route or resend.

Organising Chairs

Ruth A Miller
Department of History,
University of Massachusetts,
Boston,
USA
E-mail: ruth.miller@umb.edu

Rob Fisher
Network Founder and Network Leader
Inter-Disciplinary.Net
Priory House, Freeland, Oxfordshire OX29 8HR
United Kingdom
E-mail: els3@inter-disciplinary.net

All papers accepted for and presented at this
conference will be eligible for publication in an
ISBN eBook. Selected papers will be invited for
development for publication in a themed hard copy
volume.

Evil, Law, and the State is part of a larger
series of on-going publishing and research
conferences run under the At the Interface
banner. This series aims to bring together people
from different areas and interests to share ideas
and explore various discussions which are
innovative and exciting.

For further details about the project please visit:
http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/ati/els/els.htm

For further details about the conference please visit:
http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/ati/els/els3/cfp.html

10/4/08

Prof. Susan Visvanathan

Prof. Susan Visvanathan is the author of Christians of Kerala (OUP 1993). An Ethnography of Mysticism (IIAS, Shimla 1998) Friendship, Interiority and Mysticism (Orient Longman 2007) and the editor of Structure and Transformation: Theory and Society in India (OUP 2001). She has been a Fellow of NMML (1989-1992) Hon. Fellow of IIAS, Shimla (1990-1995) Charles Wallace Fellow to Queen's University Belfast, (1997) and Visiting Professor to MSH, Paris, (2004). She is also a writer of fiction and poetry.

Prof. Jane Schukoske

Prof. Jane Schukoske is a New Delhi-based law professor who is an Advisor to the Om Prakash Jindal Gramin Jan Kalyan Sansthan, the sponsoring body for the proposed O.P. Jindal Global University and Jindal Global Law School to be established in Sonipat, Haryana, www.jgls.org. From 1988 - 2000, she taught Contracts, Law and Social Reform, Professional Responsibility and clinical courses on housing law, environmental justice, and community development at University of Baltimore School of Law in Maryland, USA, where she is a visiting faculty member in the LL.M. program in Law of the United States. From May 2000 - April 2008, she headed the U.S. Educational Foundation in India (USEFI, recently renamed U.S.-India Educational Foundation, USIEF). She has over nine years experience in civil legal services practice prior to teaching. She has a B.A. from Boston University College of Liberal Arts, J.D. from Vanderbilt University Law School, and LL.M. from Georgetown University Law Center. She was a Fulbright Scholar at University of Colombo, Sri Lanka. Her publications include law review articles on topics in state and local finance, environmental law, and community development, and book chapters on clinical legal education and international education topics. She has interests in community development and clinical legal education.

10/2/08

Jeremy Roche

Jeremy Roche studied at the Universities of Kent and Cambridge and joined the Open University in 1995. He is senior lecturer in law in the Faculty of Health and Social Care and Associate Dean (Curriculum and Awards) for the Faculty. His research interests lie in the area of children's rights, law, policy and professional practice. He has written extensively in this field including (with S. Tucker) Youth in Society (Sage) and (with W.Stainton-Rogers) Children's Welfare and Children's Rights. He served on the Management Committee of the Children's Legal Centre between 1990 and 1994 and was on the editorial board of Social and Legal Studies from 1991 to 2003.

9/30/08

Dr Nimushakavi Vasanthi

Dr Nimushakavi Vasanthi has been teaching at the NALSAR University of Law, Hyderabad, A.P, India for the past 8 years. She has taught a range of courses in Constitutional law, Administrative law, Criminal law, Contracts II, Property law, Poverty and law, Labour law, Taxation and Clinic courses. She is currently teaching the Legal methods and Taxation course and a seminar in Discrimination Law. She has over nine years experience in litigation prior to joining the university. She is a graduate of Osmania University and has also taught part time at the university. Her LLM was in Constitutional law. She took her Doctoral Degree in 2005. Her publications include a book titled Constitutional Policy and Environmental Jurisprudence in India. She has interests in gender, disability and clinical legal education. She co-chaired the panel on labour rights in a Session: Resurrecting/renegotiating labour rights in a globalising world and presented a paper "Critical theory and contract labour" at the CLC Hyderabad in Sept 2006.

Mostafa Mahmud Naser

Mostafa M. Naser is currently teaching in the Department of Law of the University of Chittagong, Bangladesh as a Assistant Professor. He completed LLB (Hons.) and LLM from the same University. His research interests include International Human Rights Law, International Humanitarian Law, Refugee and Migration Law.

9/29/08

Veena Das

Veena Das is Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Anthropology and Professor of Humanities at the Johns Hopkins University. Her most recent book is Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary, California University Press, 2006. She has worked on themes of violence, social suffering, health and disease, and anthropology of the everyday. Currently she is engaged in a longitudinal study of urban neighbourhoods in Delhi. Das is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Academy of Sciences for Developing Societies. She has received several honours including the Andrez Retzius Prize of the Swedish Society of Anthropology and Geography and an honorary doctorate in Humane Letters from the University of Chicago.

Deepak Mehta

Deepak Mehta is Reader at the Department of Sociology. He is the author of Work, Ritual, Biography: A Muslim Community in North India, 1997 (OUP) and co-author of Living With Violence: An Anthropology of Events and Everyday Life, 2007 (Routledge). He is currently working on the afterlife of the destruction of the Babri Mosque.

9/28/08

Introducing Professor George H. Gadbois, Jr

Professor George H. Gadbois, Jr is professor emeritus (political science) at the University of Kentucky. Over the years he has published extensively dealing mainly with Indian Supreme Court. At present, Professor George H. Gadbois, Jr is completing a book-length manuscript dealing with the first 93 judges (1950-1989).

9/25/08

SEMINAR POST

WOMEN'S STUDIES PROGRAMME
and
CENTRE FOR THE STUDY OF LAW AND GOVERNANCEinvites you to a seminar

"Playing Off Courts: Negotiating Divorce and Violence In Courts, Police and Mediation Boards in Kolkata"

by

Dr. Srimati Basu
Associate Professor, Gender & Women's Studies
University of Kentucky

DATE: 30TH SEPTEMBER, 2008
TIME: 3.00 P.M.
VENUE: COMMITTEE ROOM NO.2, SSS-II.

The Indian State's management of divorce and domestic violence is enacted through a number of potentially contradictory fora, including civil and criminal remedies and formal and informal mediation. This paper focuses on Section 498 of the Indian Penal Code which legislates against "torture" and has been the primary criminal law governing domestic violence. It is a criminal provision of legendary notoriety, believed variously to be emblematic of the crux of feminist dystopia or of toothless symbolic legislation. Analyzing the discourse of litigants, judges, police and mediators in Family Courts, Women's Grievance Cells and Mediation Boards, this paper delineates the significance of domestic violence in the political economy of marriage: the tensions between looking to marriage for economic sustenance and undoing marriage through invocations of violence, the salience of social class in claiming the harm of violence, and the radical potential of laws of gender justice that may be contrarily deployed to secure dominant notions of domestic order. Existent criminal provisions may be used to leverage socioeconomic needs, but simultaneously, litigants construct violation differently than legal categories and seek complex remedies.

ALL ARE WELCOME

9/18/08

SEMINAR POST

Centre for International Legal Studies
School of International Studies
JNU
cordially invites you to a talk
on
The Ethics of Humanitarian Intervention
by
Dr. Namrata Goswami
Associate Fellow
IDSA
Time: 11 a.m.
Date: 19 September 2008 (Friday)
Venue: Room No. 117 (First Floor), SIS
All are cordially invited
:

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/