Lawyering and Litigating In Indian Courts: Some Litigant Perspectives

This paper is an extract from the author\u27s doctoral dissertation in the Sociology of law. It describes and represents perceptions and experiences of litigants with our courts and with lawyers and judges. It focusses on issues devolving on questions of the law\u27s legitimacy and the nature and effects of dispute processing. The data, drawn from interviews with only 65 litigants at various levels of the court system, even if not facilitative of generalizations, does throw light on aspects of what may be termed the phenomenology of lawyering and litigating in Indian courts or, more precisely, everyday legal practices. The data indexes, as it were, the context in which the everyday activities of such legal functionaries as lawyers and judges could be interpreted

Remise en cause de l’internalisme relatif au droit et à l’obligation légale.Les orientations indiennes classiques

Nous nous efforcerons de produire une lecture réflexive du droit et de l’obligation légale selon les orientations classiques « indiennes » sur cette question, prenant comme point de départ les réflexions sous-jacentes à l’ouvrage précurseur de l’universitaire français Robert Lingat qui avait cherché à décrire une condition antérieure du droit en Inde. Celle-ci, bien que ne devant nullement son existence à des actes législatifs ou à des décisions judiciaires, est pourtant dotée d’une force contraignante qui n’est pas interne. Ayant substitué la notion d’autorité à celle de légalité, le système judiciaire classique de l’Inde est une anomalie dans le sens le plus fort du terme ; et, en tant que tel, illustre une forme forte d’extériorité suscitée par la fermeture sur elle-même du système classique. En effet, prendre au sérieux l’affirmation de Lingat selon laquelle le devoir et l’autorité sont constitutifs des notions de droit et d’obligation légale classiques nécessite de donner un sens à cette « extériorité » et à la manière dont nous nous en chargeons en tant que théoriciens dont la tâche est d’articuler les limites du droit dans des contextes historiques et culturels. Notre lecture réflexive du droit et de l’obligation légale va contourner deux écueils. Le premier est la recherche étymologique du terme sanskrit de dharma, recherche dont nous sommes totalement incapable. Bien que conservant la référence de manière générale à ce que les spécialistes du sanskrit considèrent comme sa signification première, ce terme servira avant tout de guide permettant d’orienter une recherche sur la normativité du droit et son cadre associé d’obligation légale. Le second piège est d’échanger la notion d’« internalisme » à propos du droit et de la morale/éthique, avec celle d’une analyse abstraite de la « force obligatoire » des normes légales. À ce propos, les examens de la nature du droit au sein de certaines écoles de philosophie du droit et de la jurisprudence occidentales ne sont pas seulement hautement métaphoriques mais elles cachent ce qui est en fait un champ indéterminé de discussion à propos des conditions nécessaires et suffisantes pour ce qui s’apparente au droit à travers le temps et les cultures.My effort here is to produce a reflexive reading of law and legal obligation as informed by classical «Indian» orientations on the question. I take as a point of departure the reflections encoded in the seminal work of the French scholar Robert Lingat who has sought to described a prior condition of the law in India which, while not owing its existence either to legislative acts or to judicial decisions, is yet armed with a power of constraint that is not internal to it. Having substituted the notion of authority for that of legality, the classical legal system of India is anomalous in the strong sense of the term; and, as such, illustrates a strong form of exteriority called forth by the self-closure of the classical system. Indeed, taking seriously Lingat’s claim that duty and authority are constitutive for classical Indian notions of law and legal obligation requires making sense of this ‘exteriority’ and of how, as theorists given over to articulating the boundaries of law in given historical and cultural contexts, we are to deal with it.Doubtless, my reflexive reading of law and legal obligation as informed by classical Indian notions will steer clear of two pitfalls. The first is an etymological inquiry into the Sanskrit term dharma, an inquiry for which I am anyway totally unequipped. Although reference will be made in a general way to what Sanskritists take to be its initial meaning, this term will function primarily as a guidepost orienting an inquiry into the normativity of law and its associated frameworks of legal obligation. The second trades in the notion of an «internalism» about law and morality/ethics for that of an abstract examination of the ‘binding force’ of legal norms. On this view, examinations of the nature of law within determinate schools of legal philosophy and Western jurisprudence are not only largely metaphorical but they also conceal what is in effect an indeterminate ground of debate about the necessary and sufficient conditions for what counts as law over time and across cultures

Patterns of judicial decision-making: An analysis of Supreme Court cases

The author analyses Supreme Court cases on the parameters of central issues involved, the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court invoked, the parties involved and the outcome of the case, the source of the appeal, the fate of the appeal, the fate of the case, the time taken for deciding the case, both by the Supreme Court and the High Court, and the patterns of consent and dissent in the judgments of the Supreme Court. The author argues that patterns of decision-making imply that a judicial decision is not merely a matter of applying a gapless system of rules, but also reflects a whole range of value choices made by judges, lawyers, and even litigants. (Editor’s abstract.

Book Review: Communal Mobilisation in South Asia: Is there a Grand Design?

The focus here is on the agency that produces religious forms and associated repertoires of action/conduct---the entire gamut of socio-religious networks of mobilization built around these forms, the organization of actual violence through these networks, and the socio-spatial rearrangements that follow in the wake of minority group victimization and isolation.religion, religion-based mobilisation, communalisation, communal mobilisation, political movements, Paul Brass, Ravinder Kaur, Sociology