Nyaya Forum and NALSAR Lecture Series on Constitutionalism bring to you a discussion on a recent publication on Public Interest Litigation. The proceedings shall touch on what PIL has come to be in the recent years, and would be of special interest to those interested in public law, constitutionalism, and litigation at higher courts in India.
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.
Ms. Vasudha Nagarajan is an Advocate, practicing at the the High Court of Judicature for the States of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh, Hyderabad. She shall be acting as a discussant for the event. Mr. Jagteshwar Singh Sohi, who is an Assistant Professor at NALSAR, shall be moderating the discussion.
Email at [email protected] for more information.
The event is being co-organised with NALSAR Lecture Series on Constitutionalism, which can be reached at lectures.constitutionalism