Law and Social Sciences Research Network: 2023

1/11/23

LASSnet Webinar Series - 15 September 2022 - Guest Lecture : Lessons from Forensic Science :Why History Matters

On behalf of LASSnet anchored at the Centre for the Study of Law and Governance, Jawaharlal Nehru University, in collaboration with the Centre for Law and Humanities, O.P. Jindal Global University and the Centre for Asian Legal Studies (CALS) SOAS, we are pleased to invite you for a talk on law and forensics by Dr Mitra Sharafi. We hope you will be able to join us and share the announcement with those interested.

Speaker

Mitra Sharafi,

Evjue-Bascom Professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School (USA) with History affiliation

Chair & Discussant

Mrinal Satish,

Professor of Law at the National Law School of India University, Bangalore

Date: 15 September 2022 (Thursday)

Time: 5 pm IST

Topic

Lessons from Forensic Science: Why History Matters?

Abstract

The rise of medical jurisprudence and forensic science historically offers important lessons for how we should approach forensics today. Drawing from the history of forensics in colonial South Asia and the common-law world during the 19th-20th centuries, this talk provides cautionary tales pertaining to field formation, the establishment and migration of credibility, and the consolidation of authority of forensic fields.

LASS net Webinar Series - 13 October 2022 - Guest Lecture : Incarcerating the Innocent :A History of Undertrial Prisoners in Colonial India

On behalf of LASSnet anchored at the Centre for the Study of Law and Governance, Jawaharlal Nehru University, in collaboration with the Centre for Law and Humanities, O.P. Jindal Global University and the Centre for Asian Legal Studies (CALS) SOAS, we are pleased to invite you for an online talk by Dr Alastair McClure on 13 October 2022 at 5 pm IST.

Paper Title

Incarcerating the Innocent: A History of Under-Trial Prisoners in Colonial India

Speaker

Alastair McClure

Assistant Professor, Department of History, University of Hong Kong

Chair & Discussant

Mayur Suresh

School of Law, SOAS

Date: 13 October at 5 pm IST

Time: 5 pm IST

Abstract

Stitching together the social life of what came before the courtroom, this paper seeks to bring the experience of pre-trial detention within histories of the criminal trial in colonial India. With the accused regularly spending weeks in lockups, barracks, tents, and prisons awaiting trial, on one level detention presented a series of practical obstacles when it came to organising a proper legal defence. At the same time, this experience brought with it a host of more basic problems, with regular complaints about the derisory provision of food, ill-treatment at the hands of the police, the exposure to the heat and the cold, and difficulty in accessing family and friends. Placing a tremendous physical and emotional burden on the accused, these problems continued when their trial was to begin. Marched through towns tied to a rope, locked in overnight train compartments, or escorted in police vans, the journey to court itself could become humiliating public spectacles. On arrival in the courtroom, whether it be a lack of access to personal clothes, the position of guards around the docks, or the use of handcuffs, the politics of how the accused was presented was then to shape how they were perceived by the jury and the judge. As will be shown, in these circumstances it was not uncommon for those making a case for their innocence to have to do so dressed in prison clothes and shackled to the dock, as they battled hunger and fatigue.

LASSnet Webinar Series - 4 May 2022 - Guest Lecture : Ethnographic Notes on the Many Lives of the Emergency

On 4 May (Wednesday)

At 6:30 pm IST

Topic

Ethnographic Notes on the Many Lives of the Emergency

Speaker

Shrimoyee Nandini Ghosh,

Assistant Professor, Azim Premji University

Chair & Discussant

Arvind Narrain,

Visiting faculty at the School of Policy and Governance, Azim Premji University & at the National Law School of India University.

LASSnet Webinar Series - 6 July 2022 - Book Discussion : An Ethnographic Approach to Forensic Medicine in India

Date: 6 July (Wednesday)

Time: 4 pm IST

Topic: An Ethnographic Approach to Forensic Medicine in India

Book Talk

Abstract: Based on a year-long ethnographic survey in the morgues of North Indian hospitals and on work on judicial archives, my book Les mots de la morgue explores the daily practice of forensic medicine. By describing the encounters between doctors, police officers and families, the medico-legal examinations, and the work involved in writing reports, I develop an anthropological approach to the relationship between medicine and law. What happens to a medical practice when it serves a legal purpose? How do writing strategies allow doctors to redefine their role in the legal process? My analyses reveal the games of anticipation, the forms of knowledge and the professional tensions which govern the production of medico-legal evidence.

Speaker

Dr Fabien Provost,

Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, King’s College London.

Chair & Discussant

Dr. Manpreet Singh, Academic Fellow, NLSIU, Bangalore

LASSnet Webinar Series - 11 March 2022 - Book Discussion :Vernacular Rights Cultures: The Politics of Origins, Human Rights, And Gendered Struggles For Justice

On behalf of LASSnet anchored at the Centre for the Study of Law and Governance, Jawaharlal Nehru University in collaboration with Centre for Law and Humanities, O.P. Jindal Global University and Centre for Asian Legal Studies (CALS) SOAS, we are pleased to invite you for a book discussion on 11 March 2022 (Friday), 7 pm IST.

Title of the book:

Vernacular Rights Cultures:

The Politics of Origins, Human Rights, and Gendered Struggles for Justice

Author:

Sumi Madhok

Professor of Political Theory and Gender Studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Discussants:

Ghazala Jamil

Assistant Professor,

Centre for the Study of Law and Governance,

Jawaharlal Nehru University

Shirin Rai

Professor, Department of Politics and International Studies & Director of Warwick Interdisciplinary Research Centre on International Development.

Naveeda Khan

Associate Professor of Anthropology, Johns Hopkins University

CHAIR

Niraja Gopal Jayal

Avantha Chair at King's India Institute, King's College London; Centennial Professor at the Department of Gender Studies, London School of Economics & Formerly Professor at the Centre for the Study of Law and Governance, Jawaharlal Nehru University

LASSnet Webinar Series - 27 January 2022 - Panel Discussion : The Cow and the Elephant as “CATTLE ” in Indian Law, Policy and Practice

LASSnet is back with its webinar series. We are pleased to invite you to the first webinar of this year which will be held in collaboration with the Centre for Law and Humanities (CLH), JGU and Centre for Asian Legal Studies (CALS) SOAS. Please join us for a panel discussion on

Animal rights, anthropatriarchy and the law

on 27 January 2022 (Thursday), 6:30 pm (IST)

with Naisargi Dave and Alok Hisarwala Gupta

moderated by Arvind Narrain

LASSnet Webinar Series - 17 December 2021 - Book Discussion : From Family to Police Force: Security and Belonging on a South Asian Border

On behalf of LASSnet anchored at the Centre for the Study of Law and Governance, Jawaharlal Nehru University in collaboration with the Centre for Law and Humanities, JGLS, and Centre for Asian Legal Studies (CALS) SOAS, we invite you to join us for a conversation on Farhana Ibrahim's recent book, From Family to Police Force: Security and Belonging on a South Asian Border.

On: 17 December 2021 (Friday), 4 pm IST

A Book Discussion:

From Family to Police Force: Security and Belonging on a South Asian Border

Speakers

Author: Farhana Ibrahim, Professor (Sociology), Humanities & Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi

Discussant: Sahana Ghosh, Assistant Professor (Sociology), National University of Singapore

LASSnet Webinar Series - 21 October 2021 - BOOK DISCUSSION: Naming Violence: Torture and Terrorism in Colonial South Asia

On behalf of LASSnet anchored at the Centre for the Study of Law and Governance, Jawaharlal Nehru University in collaboration with the Centre for Law and Humanities, JGLS, and Centre for Asian Legal Studies (CALS) SOAS, we invite you to join us for a panel discussion on the colonial histories of torture and terror in South Asia.

This panel curates an important conversation between two authors, led by Radhika Singha and Joseph McQuade’s response on his book, A Genealogy of Terrorism: Colonial Law and the Origins of an Idea (Cambridge University Press, 2020) and Jinee Lokaneeta's comment with Deana Heath’s response on her book, Colonial Terror: Torture and State Violence in Colonial India (OUP, 2021).

Please join us for a discussion on 21 October 2021 (Thursday), 5.30 PM IST

Theme

Naming Violence: Torture and Terrorism in Colonial South Asia.

Chair

Mayur Suresh, Senior Lecturer, School of Law, SOAS, University of London

Speakers

Radhika Singha, Eminent Historian and Professor of History, Formerly at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi

Jinee Lokaneeta, Professor and Chair, Political Science and International Relations, Drew University

Joseph McQuade, Richard Charles Lee Postdoctoral Fellow in the Asian Institute at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, University of Toronto

Deana Heath, Reader in Indian and Colonial History, University of Liverpool

LASSnet Webinar Series - 24 September 2021 - BOOK DISCUSSION ON: From the Colonial to the Contemporary: Images, Iconography, Memories, and Performances of Law in India’s High Courts

On behalf of LASSnet anchored at the Centre for the Study of Law and Governance, Jawaharlal Nehru University in collaboration with the Centre for Law and Humanities, JGLS, and Centre for Asian Legal Studies (CALS) SOAS, it gives us great pleasure to invite you for a panel discussion on Rahela Khorakiwala’s book, "From the Colonial to the Contemporary: Images, Iconography, Memories, and Performances of Law in India’s High Courts".

In conversation with

Rahela Khorakiwala

BOOK DISCUSSION ON:

From the Colonial to the Contemporary: Images, Iconography, Memories, and Performances of Law in India’s High Courts

SPEAKERS

Peter Goodrich, Professor of Law, Director, Program in Law and Humanities,

Cardozo Law

Kanika Sharma, Lecturer in Law, Director, Centre for Asian Legal Studies,

SOAS University of London

Swastee Ranjan, PhD, University of Sussex

CHAIR

Mani Shekhar Singh, Professor of Sociology, Jindal Global Law School,

O.P. Jindal Global University

When: Friday, 24 September 2021 at 7 pm IST (09:30 AM Eastern Time (US and Canada/2.30 pm London)

Topic: From the Colonial to the Contemporary: Images, Iconography, Memories, and Performances of Law in India’s High Courts

LASSNET Webinar - 8 July 2021 - Panel Discussion: The Making and Unmaking of Illegality : Ethnographic Commentaries on Scenes of Authoritarian Law

The Making and Unmaking of Illegality: Ethnographic Commentaries on Scenes of Authoritarian Law

This panel explores three areas of contestation in contemporary India: riot cases from Gujarat, foreigners tribunals in Assam and terrorism trials in Delhi. In bringing ethnographic attention to each of these judicial sites, the panel aims to understand how legality is made and unmade through everyday legal processes.

Speakers

Moyukh Chatterjee, Visiting Research Scholar at Middlebury College

Ordinary trials and the making of permanent minorities: Notes from inside the laboratory of Hindu nationalism

Fariya Yesmin, Doctoral Candidate at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Delhi

Understanding the everyday of a courtroom: Making of the foreigner in the Foreigner’s Tribunals in Assam, India

Mayur Suresh, Lecturer, SOAS

‘Terrorism’ v. technicalities: How terror-accused navigate trials proceedings

Chair & Discussant

Prof. Deepak Mehta, Dept of Sociology and Anthropology, Ashoka University

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/