Several readers have enquired about the draft Prevention of Torture Bill 2008, mentioned in my article on impunity provisions. This blog discussed the possibility of bipartisan consensus on outlawing torture in the aftermath of the Pragya Thakur case here, and the connection between torture and confessions here. I still think that the Bill, if enacted, will join other platitudes unless we repeal impunity provisions.
My apologies for the bad quality of the text of the Torture Bill. It is the best my scanner could do, with unclear text to begin with. (Thanks to Maneesh Chhibber for sharing the document and to Venkatesan for sending me a hard copy by post.) One should not need to go through such trouble merely to get access to an important piece of draft legislation. This guest post on our blog dealt with problems in accessing legal material, and the possibilities under the Right to Information Act. This recent article also bemoans the secrecy surrounding law-making. Perhaps newspapers, which sometimes have privileged access to primary documents, should upload them on their websites. Of course, the long term solution must lie with the government living up to its obligations under s. 4 of the RTI Act.
Showing posts with label Legal Resources. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Legal Resources. Show all posts
Saturday, April 25, 2009
Sunday, March 29, 2009
The NUJS Law Review: another step towards reviving strong legal scholarship in India
The new National Law Schools have often – and justifiably – been criticized for their failure to develop a strong scholarly and research tradition and a corresponding body of scholarship on Indian law. The reasons for this failure are quite complicated, and are the subject of considerable debate. One measure of scholarly contributions is the existence of a quality journal. Two decades after the establishment of the first National Law School in Bangalore, there is no single journal within the country which can justifiably claim that it matches the heights reached by the Journal of the Indian Law Institute in its first two decades (even that esteemed journal has since been unable to consistently keep up with that level of quality in recent years).
The good news, however, is that most of the new schools now acknowledge this lacuna, and are taking steps to address it. One such measure is the renewed focus on student edited journals, and the determined efforts of their editorial boards to raise the profile of their publications by soliciting high-quality pieces from lawyers and academics within India and abroad. Simultaneously, the journals also provide a vehicle for well-researched pieces by current students, thereby paving the way for a future generation of homegrown academics. Significantly, a number of these journals have chosen to digitize their issues, and have also made efforts to provide free online access to archived issues. The trend was initially started by journals at the National Law School, Bangalore (the National Law School of India Review, the Socio-Legal Review and the Indian Journal of Law and Technology) and has been followed by NALSAR Hyderabad (the Indian Journal of Constitutional Law and the Indian Journal of Intellectual Property Law).
This post seeks to highlight the emergence of the NUJS Law Review, which has joined the trend noted above. Although only three issues old, it is quickly moving towards the achievement of its founding objectives of becoming a “medium of expression and preservation of legal research” while simultaneously serving as “an important component of legal education, training and skills learning for the students of NUJS.” The archives section of the dedicated website of the journal (perhaps a first for a student-run journal, although the IJCL has a tie-up with the commercial database Indlaw that allows it to have a separate section on an existing website) now features the full contents of the first three issues of the journal.
Each of the three issues features stimulating articles on topical issues by some leading foreign (usually German) and domestic scholars, while also containing shorter comments and notes by NUJS students. The subjects canvassed so far include : international criminal law, EU integration, , IP law, WTO law, telecommunications law, election law and a host of other topics. The book review section of each issue covers significant books on Indian law that have been published recently. Many of these articles make for interesting reading. Given my own interests, I found articles by Professors Goerlich (providing a German constitutional analysis of the death penalty) and MP Singh (which is probably one of the early published analyses of the Ashoka Kumar Thakur case) particularly stimulating.
What is most heartening about the journal is that the quality of its student-authored contributions appears to be steadily improving. The third issue in particular presents the work of a team of students, who call themselves ‘the basis structure research group’ and have authored a set of six articles focusing on various aspects of the Kesavananda ruling. Even as I have only begun to make my way through these articles, I am struck by the intellectual ambition and rigour of the analysis on display. As explained in the joint foreword by the authors, the project appears to be the result of a two-year study, and the final papers offer many provocative leads on a subject which may well be the single most analysed issue within Indian constitutional law scholarship.
The NUJS Law Review is somewhat unique in having chosen to be a quarterly. Given that more established journals have had trouble in bringing out even one annual issue in recent times, this fact is itself an indication of the ambitious nature of the project. If the fare that has been on offer so far is anything to go by, we may well have good reasons to closely watch out for succeeding issues.
The good news, however, is that most of the new schools now acknowledge this lacuna, and are taking steps to address it. One such measure is the renewed focus on student edited journals, and the determined efforts of their editorial boards to raise the profile of their publications by soliciting high-quality pieces from lawyers and academics within India and abroad. Simultaneously, the journals also provide a vehicle for well-researched pieces by current students, thereby paving the way for a future generation of homegrown academics. Significantly, a number of these journals have chosen to digitize their issues, and have also made efforts to provide free online access to archived issues. The trend was initially started by journals at the National Law School, Bangalore (the National Law School of India Review, the Socio-Legal Review and the Indian Journal of Law and Technology) and has been followed by NALSAR Hyderabad (the Indian Journal of Constitutional Law and the Indian Journal of Intellectual Property Law).
This post seeks to highlight the emergence of the NUJS Law Review, which has joined the trend noted above. Although only three issues old, it is quickly moving towards the achievement of its founding objectives of becoming a “medium of expression and preservation of legal research” while simultaneously serving as “an important component of legal education, training and skills learning for the students of NUJS.” The archives section of the dedicated website of the journal (perhaps a first for a student-run journal, although the IJCL has a tie-up with the commercial database Indlaw that allows it to have a separate section on an existing website) now features the full contents of the first three issues of the journal.
Each of the three issues features stimulating articles on topical issues by some leading foreign (usually German) and domestic scholars, while also containing shorter comments and notes by NUJS students. The subjects canvassed so far include : international criminal law, EU integration, , IP law, WTO law, telecommunications law, election law and a host of other topics. The book review section of each issue covers significant books on Indian law that have been published recently. Many of these articles make for interesting reading. Given my own interests, I found articles by Professors Goerlich (providing a German constitutional analysis of the death penalty) and MP Singh (which is probably one of the early published analyses of the Ashoka Kumar Thakur case) particularly stimulating.
What is most heartening about the journal is that the quality of its student-authored contributions appears to be steadily improving. The third issue in particular presents the work of a team of students, who call themselves ‘the basis structure research group’ and have authored a set of six articles focusing on various aspects of the Kesavananda ruling. Even as I have only begun to make my way through these articles, I am struck by the intellectual ambition and rigour of the analysis on display. As explained in the joint foreword by the authors, the project appears to be the result of a two-year study, and the final papers offer many provocative leads on a subject which may well be the single most analysed issue within Indian constitutional law scholarship.
The NUJS Law Review is somewhat unique in having chosen to be a quarterly. Given that more established journals have had trouble in bringing out even one annual issue in recent times, this fact is itself an indication of the ambitious nature of the project. If the fare that has been on offer so far is anything to go by, we may well have good reasons to closely watch out for succeeding issues.
Saturday, February 14, 2009
E-Legal: The Government efforts, shortcomings and suggestions
Guest Post from Sushant Sinha:
Government has taken significant effort in making primary legal resources publicly available on the Internet. The commitment seems to be present but what is lacking is in details. M J Antony highlights some of these problems in in his business standard piece. He points out that there is a lack of standardization across court websites and the search options are complicated for common people to use. The second problem he highlights is that the tribunals and many high courts are working very slowly to achieve this goal. Sikkim, Gauhati and Patna high courts have not yet started uploading the judgments on their websites and some tribunals have made very few judgments online. A standard user interface is often a contentious debate as it depends on how people search a particular set of documents. However, difference in opinions is not the real problem here. The problem is that the court website designers have not thought about the design well to justify their interfaces. Most of the interfaces seem ad hoc and are backed by a very narrow use case. For example, many court websites allow you to search for court judgments by year and number. This is useful if you are involved in the case but rarely useful if you are a general user and looking for new judgments. So standardization is not the real solution but a careful analysis of use cases and then designing user interfaces to support them is required. Antony is quite accurate that some high courts and tribunals are slow in uploading judgments. I would definitely like that to be speeded up. Beside these issues, court website operators have other problems that they should think about. Punjab and Haryana court had a legal warning on the website threatening that others should not copy the judgments from their website for commercial purposes. Considering judgments are in public domain, such warnings seem wrongly placed. I emailed them a few months back but never got any reply. Later I found that they removed the warning. Tarunabh in his Frontline piece highlighted a similar encumbered access to the online availability of gazettes. IndiaCode has been a wonderful effort in making all central laws along with their amendments available online. However, some acts like the Copyright Act have not been updated recently. Some statutes like the Code of Civil Procedure is not available. I have emailed them earlier requesting their update policy and the reason behind missing documents. But I have not been lucky to be blessed with a government reply.
It is hard to speculate why such problems exist. My guess is that the government offices may be understaffed or that they do not have enough expertise. If lack of expertise is the issue, then government should try to involve the community for their software development. A few steps required for this will be to open up their code bases to public and then start being more responsive. There will be far better code reuse and many people including me would be happy to supply them with better designs and bug fixes.
(Sushant runs the search site for legal databases Indian Kanoon)
Government has taken significant effort in making primary legal resources publicly available on the Internet. The commitment seems to be present but what is lacking is in details. M J Antony highlights some of these problems in in his business standard piece. He points out that there is a lack of standardization across court websites and the search options are complicated for common people to use. The second problem he highlights is that the tribunals and many high courts are working very slowly to achieve this goal. Sikkim, Gauhati and Patna high courts have not yet started uploading the judgments on their websites and some tribunals have made very few judgments online. A standard user interface is often a contentious debate as it depends on how people search a particular set of documents. However, difference in opinions is not the real problem here. The problem is that the court website designers have not thought about the design well to justify their interfaces. Most of the interfaces seem ad hoc and are backed by a very narrow use case. For example, many court websites allow you to search for court judgments by year and number. This is useful if you are involved in the case but rarely useful if you are a general user and looking for new judgments. So standardization is not the real solution but a careful analysis of use cases and then designing user interfaces to support them is required. Antony is quite accurate that some high courts and tribunals are slow in uploading judgments. I would definitely like that to be speeded up. Beside these issues, court website operators have other problems that they should think about. Punjab and Haryana court had a legal warning on the website threatening that others should not copy the judgments from their website for commercial purposes. Considering judgments are in public domain, such warnings seem wrongly placed. I emailed them a few months back but never got any reply. Later I found that they removed the warning. Tarunabh in his Frontline piece highlighted a similar encumbered access to the online availability of gazettes. IndiaCode has been a wonderful effort in making all central laws along with their amendments available online. However, some acts like the Copyright Act have not been updated recently. Some statutes like the Code of Civil Procedure is not available. I have emailed them earlier requesting their update policy and the reason behind missing documents. But I have not been lucky to be blessed with a government reply.
It is hard to speculate why such problems exist. My guess is that the government offices may be understaffed or that they do not have enough expertise. If lack of expertise is the issue, then government should try to involve the community for their software development. A few steps required for this will be to open up their code bases to public and then start being more responsive. There will be far better code reuse and many people including me would be happy to supply them with better designs and bug fixes.
(Sushant runs the search site for legal databases Indian Kanoon)
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
OCCASIONAL DIGEST
1. V.R.Krishna Iyer on the case for a council to choose Judges
2.A.G.Noorani's review of David Pannick's book, I Have To Move My Car: Tales of Unpersuasive Advocates and Injudicious Judges.
3.The bizarre story of a journalist-cum-editor in Mangalore, B.V.Seetaram, who was jailed for defamation.
4.Why sub-categorisation of Scheduled Castes in Tamil Nadu enjoys all-party support -separate slice.
5.Tarunabh Khaitan on RTI: dismantling the walls of secrecy
6.Three important books aim to bring clarity to the mostly misunderstood concept of judicial activism in India: My review of Courting Social Justice,(edited by Varun Gauri and Daniel M. Brinks,Cambridge Univ.Press), Shylashri Shankar's Scaling Justice and Sudhir Krishnaswamy's Democracy and Constitutionalism in India. (OUP).
2.A.G.Noorani's review of David Pannick's book, I Have To Move My Car: Tales of Unpersuasive Advocates and Injudicious Judges.
3.The bizarre story of a journalist-cum-editor in Mangalore, B.V.Seetaram, who was jailed for defamation.
4.Why sub-categorisation of Scheduled Castes in Tamil Nadu enjoys all-party support -separate slice.
5.Tarunabh Khaitan on RTI: dismantling the walls of secrecy
6.Three important books aim to bring clarity to the mostly misunderstood concept of judicial activism in India: My review of Courting Social Justice,(edited by Varun Gauri and Daniel M. Brinks,Cambridge Univ.Press), Shylashri Shankar's Scaling Justice and Sudhir Krishnaswamy's Democracy and Constitutionalism in India. (OUP).
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)