CENTRE FOR THE STUDY OF LAW AND GOVERNANCE
Jawaharlal Nehru University
CSLG Book Discussion
Courting the People: Public Interest Litigation in Post-Emergency India
By
Anuj Bhuwania
SPEAKERS
Anuj Bhuwania, Assistant Professor, South Asia University, New Delhi
P Puneeth, Associate Professor, Centre for the Study of Law and Governance, JNU
Raveena Naz, Research Scholar, Centre for the Study of Law and Governance, JNU
FRIDAY, APRIL 21, 2017 AT 3 PM
CONFERENCE ROOM, CSLG, JNU
Brief description of the book:
The Indian higher judiciary has acquired an increasingly important role in India's public discourse in the last few decades. The Supreme Court and the state High Courts have emerged as enormously powerful judicial institutions in the aftermath of the Internal Emergency of 1975-77. The principal means through which these judicial powers have been mobilized and enacted is the jurisdiction of Public Interest Litigation (PIL). This book studies the political role that PIL has come to play in contemporary India. It revisits the circumstances and manoeuvres that led to the rise of PIL and traces its political journey since then, arguing that the enormous powers that PIL confers upon the appellate judiciary stems from its populist character.
Based on empirical research, it shows how PIL grants the appellate courts enormous flexibility in procedure allowing them to manoeuvre themselves into positions of overweening authority. It focuses on the most intensive laboratory of PIL in recent times, the city of Delhi, and foregrounds the role that PIL has played in the radical reconfiguration of the city in the 21st century. While PIL cases are usually politically analysed solely in terms of their effects, whether beneficial or disastrous, this book locates the political challenges that PIL poses in its very process: arguing that its fundamentally protean nature stems from its mimicry of ideas of popular justice.
Courting the People examines PIL as part of a larger trend towards legal informalism in post-Emergency India. Casting a critical eye at these institutional reforms that aimed to adapt the colonial legal inheritance to 'Indian realities', this book looks at the challenges posed by self-consciously culturalist juridicial innovations like PIL to ideas of fairness in adjudication as well as democratic politics.
About the Author: Anuj Bhuwania teaches at South Asian University, New Delhi. He studied law in National Law School of India University, Bangalore and School of Oriental and African Studies, London before doing his PhD in Anthropology at Columbia University in New York. He has earlier taught at Jindal Global Law School as well as held visiting positions at the Centre for Modern Indian Studies, University of Goettingen, the Centre for the Study of Developing Society (CSDS) and the Centre for the Study of Law and Governance (CSLG) in Jawaharlal Nehru University. Courting the People: Public Interest Litigation in Post-Emergency India, published in December 2016 by Cambridge University Press, is his first book.
