scholarly journals The Revival of the Right to Property in India

2015 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-52
Author(s):  
Tom ALLEN
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
Social Issues ◽  
Social Revolution ◽  
Constitutional Design ◽  
The Core ◽  
Supreme Court Of India ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
The Right

AbstractOver the last six decades, the Supreme Court of India has created and re-created a right to property from very weak textual sources, despite constitutional declarations calling for social revolution, numerous amendments to reverse key judgments, and even, in 1978, the repeal of the core constitutional provisions guaranteeing a right to property. This article challenges the usual account of these developments. The primary contention is that the 1978 repeal is much less significant than it appears, due to the Court’s creative interpretation of other constitutional provisions. The Supreme Court has consistently advanced liberal models of constitutionalism and property, despite the influence of other models on the original constitutional design and later amendments. This article also examines whether the Court’s liberalism is compatible with the egalitarian values of theConstitution, and how its position will affect attempts to address social issues relating to the distribution of property in India.

scholarly journals Concept of right to life and its protection under the Constitution of India

2019 ◽  
pp. 55-68
Author(s):  
HARSH PATHAK
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
Fundamental Rights ◽  
Right To Life ◽  
Indian Constitution ◽  
Personal Liberty ◽  
Supreme Court Of India ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Original Sense ◽  
Life Itself ◽  
The Right

The constitution and jurist characterized Article 21 as, “the procedural magna carta, protective of life and liberty”. This right has been held to be the heart of the constitution, the most organic and progressive provision in Indian constitution, the foundation of our laws. Article 21 can only be claimed when a person is deprived of his “life” or “personal liberty” by the “State” as defined in Article 12. Violation of the right by private individuals is not within the preview of it. Article 21 applies to natural persons. The right is available to every person, citizen or alien. It, however, does not entitle a foreigner the right to reside and settle in India, as mentioned in Article 19 (1) (e). Everyone has the right to life, liberty and the security of person. The right to life is undoubtedly the most fundamental of all rights. All other rights add quality to the life in question and depend on the pre-existence of life itself for their operation. There would have been no fundamental rights worth mentioning if Article 21 had been interpreted in its original sense. This Article will examine the right to life as interpreted and applied by the Supreme Court of India.

Constitutional Law and Islamic Hijabs in Kenyan Schools: The Supreme Court’s Specious Constraint in Methodist Church in Kenya

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Sang YK
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
Constitutional Rights ◽  
Religious Expression ◽  
Methodist Church ◽  
The Core ◽  
Majority Decision ◽  
Legal Questions ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Core Issue ◽  
The Right

ABSTRACT This article analyses the content and implications of the Supreme Court of Kenya’s judgment in Methodist Church in Kenya v Mohamed Fugicha and 3 Others. There, by majority decision, the Supreme Court overturned the Court of Appeal’s ruling that reasonable accommodation be made for the wearing of Islamic hijabs by female Muslim students in Kenyan schools. While Methodist Church in Kenya was expected to clarify the scope of the right to manifest religious belief in Kenya, the Supreme Court used specious logic based on legalism to avoid that issue. This article shows how the majority decision contradicts principles of enforcement of constitutional rights by focusing unduly on procedural technicalities, avoiding the core issue of permissible restrictions on religious expression and leaving key legal questions unresolved. It also highlights the well-reasoned dissenting opinion that addressed the core issue and which has crucial import for future development of religious freedom jurisprudence in Kenya

The Supreme Court of India and the Inter-Institutional Dynamics of Legislated Social Rights

2020 ◽  
Vol 53 (4) ◽  
pp. 411-437
Author(s):  
Gaurav Mukherjee
Keyword(s):  
Food Security ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Separation Of Powers ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Democratic Legitimacy ◽  
Social Rights ◽  
Socioeconomic Rights ◽  
Supreme Court Of India ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
The Right

The jurisprudence of the Supreme Court of India is generally celebrated in the academic literature for its creative use of constitutional interpretation to read in certain socioeconomic rights into the ‘right to life’ provision despite their textual absence from the Constitution. However, this line of case law made the obtainment of a judicial remedy highly conditional upon an extant scheme or law, was necessarily piecemeal, deferent to the executive, and incapable of fixing precise accountability upon a violation or addressing issues of systemic material insufficiency. Much of this had to do with the absence of a rights-based legislative framework. The enactment of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, 2005 (MGNREGA) and the National Food Security Act, 2013 (NFSA) presented major developments in the livelihood and food security regimes in India, and a leap forward for legislated social rights. These legislations consolidated, expanded and entrenched a number of existing rights which had come into being through judicial decisions. In this paper, I examine the antecedents of social rights in India, and show the afterlife of disagreements over appropriateness, practicality and affordability, which resulted in the adoption of the Directive Principles of State Policy (DPSP) in the Indian Constituent Assembly, persist in legislative design and judicial reasoning. In this paper, I analyse judicial treatment of these laws and propose a novel theoretical framework for better understanding them. The theoretical framework has discursively antagonistic and discursively catalytic components, and sheds light on the inter-branch institutional dynamic which arises when NFSA and MGNREGA based public interest litigation (PIL) is activated. I suggest that such PIL and the kinds of complex, dialogic remedies which result from them have effects in the political, legal, and social fields. These remedies result in a form of hybridized politico-legal accountability that enables the Supreme Court of India to safeguard its institutional capital, while also being able to better engage with concerns such as polycentricity, democratic legitimacy, lack of expertise, federalism, and the separation of powers.

Pre-constitutional Laws in India: Beyond Presumption of Constitutionality

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Snehil Kunwar Singh
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
Constitutional Law ◽  
The Core ◽  
Supreme Court Of India ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Indian Law ◽  
Judicial Scrutiny ◽  
The Impact

Abstract Recent judgements of the Supreme Court of India have done away with presumption of constitutionality for pre-constitutional laws in India. Regarded as one of the core principles in the study of interpretation of statutes, presumption of constitutionality assumes great significance when constitutionality of any law is under challenge. Removal of this presumption for pre-constitutional laws has far-reaching potential on judicial scrutiny of vires of pre-constitutional laws. However, the implications of such removal on pre-constitutional laws have not been studied. This article is an attempt to study such implications. I shall take example of Indian law on sedition, which is a pre-constitutional law, to demonstrate the impact of removal of the presumption.

Response of India towards Torture and Custodial Violence

2020 ◽  
pp. 81-149
Author(s):  
Joshua N. Aston
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
Armed Forces ◽  
Legal Framework ◽  
Special Rapporteur ◽  
Supreme Court Of India ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
The Right ◽  
Supreme Court Rulings ◽  
National Police

The chapter deals with the legal framework in India against torture and custodial violence and the response and role of the Indian police force in such crimes. It also gives statistical data on violence taking place in the country at the hands of the police and armed forces. It provides a summary of the report of the United Nations Special Rapporteur on arbitrary and extra-judicial executions. The chapter also discusses the right to protection against torture and the views and verdicts of the Supreme Court of India, and highlights the role of statutory bodies and commissions such as the Law Commission of India and the National Police Commission in preventing torture and custodial violence. Therefore, this chapter has reference to several laws of the country and the Constitution of India and its provisions, and it cites some cases and Supreme Court rulings for preventing torture and custodial violence, which provides India’s response towards the prevention of torture and custodial violence and protecting victims as well as every citizen from such crimes.

‘Using’ Crisis of Governance as an Opportunity for ‘Re-invention’: Why the Supreme Court of India Took To Hearing Public Interest Litigations—A Case Study

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 215-223
Author(s):  
Subrata Biswas
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
Public Interest ◽  
Good Governance ◽  
Positive Role ◽  
Indian Politics ◽  
Supreme Court Of India ◽  
The People ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
The Right

What do the different State organs do when they face a crisis? Do the suffering institutions successfully re-invent themselves or is it that some other institution uses the crisis to find an ‘opportunity’ to re-invent itself? Can one’s crisis be another’s opportunity? This case-study analyses how the Supreme Court of India (hereinafter SCI) reinvented itself in a bid to further the cause of good governance in the country ever since emergency had been clamped on the nation towards the end of 1970s. Surely there has been a crisis of governance in India, caused by the pathetic performance of both the legislature and the executive. It has led to myriad problems in both social and political arenas. If left unaddressed, Indian people might have turned more violent than they already are and that could have perpetrated a failure of democracy in the country. But the SCI has successfully played a positive role in this regard. If the other institutions have failed the people, the Supreme Court has championed their cause. The world’s largest democracy stands saved until now. But is it wholly the judges’ heartfelt concern for the people that has prompted the Supreme Court to function in this fashion? Did anything go wrong during the emergency? Why is it that it has been more and more active ever since the emergency ended? And why is it that there has been an exponential growth in public interest litigations (hereinafter PILs) in the Supreme Court even though it cannot handle so many cases because of infrastructural paucities? Situating itself in the specific context of PILs entertained by the SCI and supporting it with the theoretical inputs of the so-called ‘principal-agent framework’, this essay argues that there has been a competition (i.e., between the court and the elected politicians) for ‘occupying’ more space in the domain of governance since the inception of the Constitution and it is only the Supreme Court that got the right ‘opportunity’ to achieve its objective in the wake of crisis in governance that became so visible in Indian politics ever since the fag-end of the 1970s. While the court tried other instruments earlier in its game plan vis-a-vis the elected politicians, the crisis situation since the end of the 1970s made it ‘invent’ a new tool in the form of PILs capable of safeguarding the interests of the people and insulating them against the mindless functioning of multiple state agencies. But how far can the SCI (hereinafter SCI) proceed with this new tool? Is there a risk of ‘overusing’ it? Does the court not have its own limitations in this regard, too? What should the Supreme Court do in order to avert a fresh ‘crisis’?

Penological Justifications as Sentencing Factors in Death Penalty Sentencing

2021 ◽  
pp. 227740172097285
Author(s):  
Anup Surendranath ◽  
Neetika Vishwanath ◽  
Preeti Pratishruti Dash
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
The Other ◽  
Death Sentence ◽  
Life Imprisonment ◽  
The Core ◽  
Supreme Court Of India ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
The One ◽  
Core Framework

When the Supreme Court of India upheld the constitutionality of the death penalty in Bachan Singh v. State of Punjab in 1980, it also laid down a sentencing framework for subsequent sentencing courts, guiding them in deciding between life imprisonment and the death penalty. This framework, popularly known as the ‘rarest of rare’ framework, was focused on individualised punishment. However, subsequent judgments have strayed away from Bachan Singh’s core framework, and the use of penological justifications as sentencing factors has contributed significantly to this deviation. This article argues that it is not within the mandate of sentencing judges to invoke penological theories as separate sentencing factors in individual cases when deciding between life imprisonment and the death sentence. The article begins by distinguishing between the penological justifications used to retain the death penalty in Bachan Singh and those underlying the sentencing framework developed in the judgment. It then examines subsequent judgments to trace the manner in which the capital sentencing framework was shaped to be crime-centric through the use of penological ideas like ‘collective conscience’ and deterrence. Examining the implications of penological justifications occupying a dominant place in death penalty sentencing, the article examines the broader concerns about the lack of clarity with sentencing goals. The failure in individual cases to distinguish between penological justifications as sentencing factors determining punishment, on the one hand, and viewing them as consequences arising out of an individualised sentencing process, on the other, lies at the core of the critique in this article.

Galvanisation of the Right to Development within the Shared Constitutional Space in India

2018 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 268-299
Author(s):  
Dharmendra Kumar Singh
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
Fundamental Rights ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Holistic View ◽  
New Horizons ◽  
Supreme Court Of India ◽  
Right To Development ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Impact

This article accentuates the concept of the right to development (rtd) and focuses on the various facets of rtd as developed by the Supreme Court of India in its multiple pronouncements since the advent of the last decade of the 20th century. The apex court, through a conjoint reading of various aspects provided in the Constitution’s Preamble, Fundamental Rights, Directive Principles and Fundamental Duties with the Declaration on rtd has interpreted various cases that have opened new horizons of curative developmental jurisprudence in India. The main aim of this study is to capture the various trends and directions of discourse on rtd and explore the constitutional space for rtd in India. This article also evaluates the impact that Declaration of rtd has had on the Supreme Court of India and to what extent has the Supreme Court of India galvanised rtd to provide remedies to millions of Indians. The article emphasises the holistic view taken by the Supreme Court in matters of private rights versus the developmental rights of millions. Another significant aspect of rtd that has been emphasised in this article is the conflict between human rights of the marginalised group with the burgeoning rtd. The discourse on economic growth and rtd within the constitutional space will remain in the heart of politicians, social scientists and the populace in the coming years.

The Right to Housing: Challenges Associated with the ‘Waiting List System’ Ekurhuleni Metropolitan Municipality V Various Occupiers, Eden Park Extension 5 2014 3 SA 23 (SCA)

2017 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 112-121
Author(s):  
Shamier Ebrahim
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
Waiting Lists ◽  
The State ◽  
Waiting List ◽  
Allocation Process ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Court Of Appeal

The right to adequate housing is a constitutional imperative which is contained in section 26 of the Constitution. The state is tasked with the progressive realisation of this right. The allocation of housing has been plagued with challenges which impact negatively on the allocation process. This note analyses Ekurhuleni Metropolitan Municipality v Various Occupiers, Eden Park Extension 51 which dealt with a situation where one of the main reasons provided by the Supreme Court of Appeal for refusing the eviction order was because the appellants subjected the unlawful occupiers to defective waiting lists and failed to engage with the community regarding the compilation of the lists and the criteria used to identify beneficiaries. This case brings to the fore the importance of a coherent (reasonable) waiting list in eviction proceedings. This note further analyses the impact of the waiting list system in eviction proceedings and makes recommendations regarding what would constitute a coherent (reasonable) waiting list for the purpose of section 26(2) of the Constitution.

Roe v. Wade and the History of Abortion Regulation

1989 ◽  
Vol 15 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 227-233 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Benjamin Linton
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
Personal Privacy ◽  
Personal Liberty ◽  
Personal Rights ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Right Of Privacy ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Right Of Privacy ◽  
The Right ◽  
Roe V Wade

In Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court held that “[the] right of privacy … founded in the Fourteenth Amendment's concept of personal liberty … is broad enough to encompass a woman's decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.” The Court acknowledged that “[t]he Constitution does not explicitly mention any right of privacy.” Nevertheless, the Court held that a “right of personal privacy, or a guarantee of certain areas or zones of privacy, does exist under the Constitution.” However, “only personal rights that can be deemed ‘fundamental’ or ‘implicit in the concept of ordered liberty,’ … are included in this guarantee of personal privacy.”

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