Law and Social Sciences Research Network: 02/01/2010

2/19/10

Supreme Court's Loss - How it can be remedied?

Cross-posted from Law and Other Things.

I draw readers' attention to Salil Tripathi's interesting piece on Justice A.P.Shah's non-elevation to the Supreme Court in Livemint. I especially liked his view that Justice Shah contributed to nyaya rather than niti.

I am sure our political class wants such a Judge in the Supreme Court. But is the President helpless in the context of Proviso to Article 124 which mandates that in the case of appointment of a Judge other than the Chief Justice, the Chief Justice of India shall always be consulted? Here are my tips on how the President can get around this problem, if she is really keen that Justice Shah must be appointed as a Supreme Court Judge.

1. There is a grey area in both the Second and Third Judges Cases as far as how the President must consult the CJI. If you read Article 124 and the judgments in these two cases carefully, you would notice that the Supreme Court did not set aside Article 124 (2)which says that the President shall consult with such of the Judges of the Supreme Court and of the High Courts in the States as she may deem necessary for the purpose. It is surprising that the President never exercised this responsibility at all since 1993 when the Second Judges Case was decided. Even prior to 1993, the President (that is, in aid and advice of the Council of Ministers) appears to have consulted only the CJI, and not other Judges.

No doubt, the judgments in the Second and Third Judges Cases explain how the consultation with the CJI must be held, that is, through the Collegium, and that consultation must be effective (not concurrence) But it could not have been the intention of the Supreme Court that the Proviso to Article 124 would leave the Article itself redundant. Therefore, having consulted the CJI through the Collegium, to satisfy the Proviso, the President could still appoint Justice Shah on the basis of her consultation with other Judges of the Supreme Court or the High Court, who might have favoured his appointment.

In the Third Judges Case, the Supreme Court confuses Article 124(2) with how the CJI ought to form his view in consultation with other senior Judges. Article 124(2) refers to President's privilege to consult any Judge whom she deems fit. This privilege cannot be compromised with that of the duty of the CJI to consult his colleagues to form his view.

2. The above interpretation is valid because the judgment in the Third Judges Case throws light on when a Collegium's recommendation may not be binding on the President, that is, in the area of non-appointment of a Judge for cogent reasons.
As the media reports reveal, Justice Shah's name was not favoured by only one member of the Collegium. All the remaining members including the CJI favoured him. Therefore, even if the President appoints Justice Shah, it will be in conformity with the view of the CJI, thus satisfying the requirement of the judgment in Third Judges Case.

There is nothing in the Third Judges Case judgment which says that the CJI can recommend an appointee only if there is a consensus within the collegium. The Court saw consensus as an ideal, but clearly said a recommendation could be sent, if there is majority support including that of CJI within the Collegium. That is, it does not envisage a veto by any member of the Collegium except by the CJI, who has primacy. Therefore, if the Collegium had not sent the recommendation on Justice Shah because of the opposition of one member, then it is certainly not in conformity with the judgment in the Third Judges Case, and therefore, not binding on the President.

3.In fact, Collegium's views on every eligible Judge in terms of seniority must be sent to the President with a recommendation to appoint or not appoint. That is why the Third Judges Case judgment says if the CJI's view is opposed by other senior Judges of the Collegium, then the President is not bound to appoint. Here, the inference is that in that situation, the CJI would have been in minority within the Collegium. But Justice Shah's case is different. The CJI and all members of the Collegium except one favoured him. Since the dissenter was in a minority in the Collegium, there was every reason for the President to appoint Justice Shah.

4. It appears that the President requested the Collegium to reconsider its non-recommendation of Justice Shah, and still the recommendation to appoint Justice Shah was not forthcoming. Here, the question of Collegium reiterating its non-recommendation in order to make it binding on the President does not arise. Reiteration is binding on the Government only in the context of recommendation to appoint, not recommendation to not appoint or failure to recommend an eligible appointee. Here is the December 2008 CNN-IBN report on the Collegium's refusal to reconsider its non-recommendation of Justice Shah.

5.The Third Judges judgment only says the Collegium need not give strong and cogent reasons for not recommending a person. But the Government can certainly ask for the Collegium's views if it considered and discussed a possible appointee. The Government, then can well decide on the basis of the minutes of the meeting- in the absence of a recommendation from the Collegium - whether the non-recommendation was in conformity with the Third Judges judgment, and whether a Judge other than the CJI illegally vetoed a possible recommendation to appoint.

6. The system of appointing Judges on the basis of recommendations from the Collegium, no doubt, was laid down in the Second and Third Judges judgments. But these judgments do not abrogate Article 124(2) and the President's privilege to consult the CJI and other Judges independently of the Collegium's recommendation, to consider appointments of eligible persons, whom the Collegium may have overlooked.

2/18/10

LASSnet Auhor: UC JHA Book Announcement

Wg Cdr (Dr) U C Jha (Retd)

1. The Military Justice System in India: An Analysis, Published by LexisNexis, 2009.

2. The Armed Forces Trbunal, Published by Manas Publications, New Delhi, 2010.

Post from Manjira Datta

Pls look up http://www.magiclanternfoundation.org/Events/pr2010/pr10_schedule.html

My films are being screened on 25th Feb at 11:45 am in Audi 1 and Audi
2 and also 5 films of mine are being screened in RETROSPECTIVE
section.
On 26th at 5 pm or thereabouts-LIFE OF THE LAW is being screened . A
film on Village Dispute Resolution.Hope LASSNET will post this on their
site or pass this message to others.
Hope to see u.
Warm wishes
Manjira Datta

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/