JGU Digital Archive

The Supreme Court directive in National Legal Services Authority v. Union of India brought in a transformative change by granting legal recognition to transgender persons. The Court issued several dicta, aiming to provide rights to transgender people and protect them from discrimination. The case marked a landmark shift in the legal regime, previously often characterized by the constant persecution and denial of rights to transgender persons. Yet, there have been multiple records indicating t...

Ronald Dworkin characterises moral and political values to be interpretive concepts. Interpretive concepts, for him, are special kinds of concepts due to their conceptual nature and the property of them being normative. In this paper I closely examine his claims based on the conceptual nature of interpretive concepts to argue that given the literature on what concepts are, interpretive concepts cannot be a distinct kind of concept based on their conceptual nature.

Employing moral values as justifications in judicial decisions has been controversial. At present, there is increasing controversy over the application of human dignity. Contemporary debates on the role of dignity in law and adjudication are heavily influenced by Christopher McCrudden’s account of dignity as a placeholder, and much thinking on the contested nature of values is influenced by WB Gallie’s idea of Essentially Contested Concepts. In this paper I argue that both these accounts have...

The paper argues for conflating refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs) as two sides of a work-in-progress postcolonial state. To be sure, aliens, refugees, IDPs, and stateless persons are separate legal entities. Nevertheless, this fragmented normative regime stands testimony to more laws and less justice. Many Asian states have no domestic refugee law. India, a common law system, takes a case by case approach as refugees are given “temporary shelter on humanitarian considerations”....

Electricity is vital for human well-being and betterment in any developing nation. The benefits of electricity are far reaching and go beyond economic considerations. India’s electricity sector requires immediate attention. An average Indian rural household receives only a few hours of electricity per day. That gives an entire family a limited space to do their basic household chores. The uses of electric heaters or gas stoves are alien to many rural households. Even in urban households, elec...

The imperfect partition of India in 1947 brought about through a devious plan by the departing British colonizers with the help of some self-serving Indian politicians was a cataclysmic event which not only brought the communal cauldron to boil but has also kept it simmering since. The deep division between Hindus and Muslims was one aspect of it, but within the Hindu society too, lines were drawn as a result of the mass migration of people from the areas now in Pakistan. Despite the numerous...

In the mainstream international development discourse, one often finds a general dualistic outlook in classifying the concept of (urban) informality, seen to be strikingly different from the formal, regulated economic arrangements. Earlier definitions explaining informality in context of market arrangements across the Global south often failed to present a cohesive, inclusive framework vital for analysing (urban) informal, socioeconomic arrangements as an integral part of rapidly urbanizing d...