Burnout and Stressors as Influencers on Work Engagement Among Law Enforcement Agents in Selected Cities

Burnout is an underlying issue that has an adverse effect on the working enthusiasm of the employees. In this chapter, the researcher has attempted to assess the influence of stressors on burnout and work engagement in the context of the Indian law enforcement agents. The study evaluates the correlations between burnout factors—emotional exhaustion, cynicism, low professional efficacy—with vigor, dedication, and absorption. For the purpose of this study, items from MBI-GS for assessing burnout, scale for stressors, and employee engagement are adapted. The construct of the scale developed was established using confirmatory factor analysis. The study was carried out for 145 law enforcement agents in the selected cities of a North Indian state. T-test results applied on stressors between male and female groups show varying results. A significant negative effect of burnout factors on work engagement factors is observed through the empirical examination using SEM AMOS.

An overview of information extraction techniques for legal document analysis and processing

<span>In an Indian law system, different courts publish their legal proceedings every month for future reference of legal experts and common people. Extensive manual labor and time are required to analyze and process the information stored in these lengthy complex legal documents. Automatic legal document processing is the solution to overcome drawbacks of manual processing and will be very helpful to the common man for a better understanding of a legal domain. In this paper, we are exploring the recent advances in the field of legal text processing and provide a comparative analysis of approaches used for it. In this work, we have divided the approaches into three classes NLP based, deep learning-based and, KBP based approaches. We have put special emphasis on the KBP approach as we strongly believe that this approach can handle the complexities of the legal domain well. We finally discuss some of the possible future research directions for legal document analysis and processing.</span>

Tribal Casino Labor Relations and Settler Colonialism

Sovereignty provides the legal basis for tribal casinos in the United States. However, since the industry’s rapid growth (valued at $34 billion for 2019), courts are now revisiting decades-old precedents in federal Indian law to reinterpret policies in ways that add new constraints to tribal sovereignty. Because tribal casinos often employ large numbers of non-Native Americans, tribal casino labor relations have become a new arena for contests over the boundaries of tribal sovereignty. This article investigates recent tribal casino labor relations court rulings (e.g. Little River, Soaring Eagle, and Pauma) through the lens of settler colonialism in order to understand new revisions to legal precedents. It argues that settler colonialism continues to underlie federal policies and that the growth of tribal casinos reveal that the federal government may intervene to undercut tribal sovereignty.

Revisiting the working of patent requirements under Indian patent law

This article aims to analyse the working of patent requirements under Indian patent law. A patent working requirement generally entails that the patentee must work or apply the patented product in the patent granting country. This article evaluates the compatibility of the patent working requirement with the TRIPS Agreement from the perspective of international human rights law. A human rights approach suggests that the rights of the patentee must be reconciled with the interests of the general public. In such pursuance, this article argues that there is a need to recalibrate the patent working requirement under the Indian law to strike a right balance between the rights of the patentee and the public interest. Particularly, this article argues that India must modify the present patent working disclosure requirements to ensure that foreign patentees are able to do business in India without bureaucratic hassles.

Federal Indian Law

Federal Indian law (FIL), also known as American Indian law, is the body of doctrine that regulates the political relationship between American Indian and Alaska Native governments and the federal government. FIL is best understood as the development of this “government-to-government” relationship, which intersects with other bodies of law like constitutional law, criminal law, and environmental law. FIL is comprised of legal doctrines, statutes, judicial decisions, treaties, and executive orders, all of which have direct influences on the rights and sovereignty of Indian tribes. In the United States there are 573 federally recognized tribes that are subject to the rights and privileges, as well as the consequences, of FIL. These federally recognized tribes are the third sovereign authority in the United States—the other two are states and the federal government—that retain inherent rights and that exercise and enjoy sovereignty and self-governance on their own lands. The historical development of FIL in the United States constitutes an important starting point in understanding the special relationship between Indian tribes and the federal government. The origins of FIL lay in three US Supreme Court cases known as the “Marshall trilogy,” after Chief Justice John Marshall, the presiding chief justice of Johnson v. McIntosh (1823), Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831), and Worcester v. Georgia (1832). At that time, the primary questions centered on the sovereign rights of Indian tribes, that is, whether Indians have dominion over themselves and their lands. Throughout the development of FIL, until today, questions of Indian tribal sovereignty—or Indigenous nation sovereignty—remained contentious as Indians continued to fight for treaty rights, autonomy, and self-determination. FIL can be described as a series of wins and losses for American Indians in their fight for sovereign rights. In the end, however, the study of FIL is equally the study of how the United States was able to legally subjugate America’s indigenous peoples and acquire their lands. FIL is basically the study of America’s justification for Native America’s colonization and the genocide perpetrated against American Indians. The literature on FIL or American Indian law is vast, but the most valuable resources are authored by and for attorneys and for students of law. Although the disciplines of Native American and Indigenous studies encompass facets of American Indian and Indigenous peoples’ lives, scholarship in FIL has proven to be beneficial. The resources cited in this article represent some of the widely used texts that provide a solid foundation for studies in FIL.

One step forward or one step back? Autonomy, agency and surrogates in the Indian Surrogacy (Regulation) Bill 2019

The Indian government has recently introduced legislation to regulate ‘altruistic’ surrogacy while banning ‘commercial’ surrogacy amidst the criticism that India has become the ‘baby factory’. In the past decade, academic discourse has raised socioethical and legal issues that surfaced in the unrestricted transnational commercial-surrogacy industry. Most of the literature and ethnographic studies centred on the issues of informed consent, autonomy, decision-making and exploitation. With the proposed legislation, the Indian government has shown its will to regulate surrogacy, including the medical intermediaries as well as the contract between the intending parents and the surrogate mother-to-be. The present paper addresses the legal and socioethical context in which India introduced the Surrogacy (Regulation) Bill 2019. It examines the extent to which the proposed law responds to the legal challenges and socioethical concerns that surfaced in the course of unregulated transnational commercial-surrogacy arrangements in India. It argues that, even though the proposed legislation addresses and responds to some of the legal and ethical concerns such as informed consent and legal parentage, it stops short of ensuring the welfare and well-being of the surrogate. Second, the legal certainty of parentage and the child's rights comes at the cost of the physical and psychological well-being of the surrogate. Finally, it argues that, by presupposing the surrogate as an autonomous agent and yet imposing the requirement of marriage, the Bill overlooks the sociocultural realities of patriarchal hierarchies entrenched in Indian society – that, in its conception of ‘family’, the focus on the ‘traditional’ family not only presents a narrow view of the heteronormative family and perpetuates the patriarchal notions of gender roles, but also fails to take into consideration maternal pluralism in surrogacy arrangements, undermines the modern family and, above all, discriminates against the single person's and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) communities’ right to found a family. Since many countries that served as centres for international commercial-surrogacy arrangement (such as Cambodia, Thailand and Nepal) have recently started to take steps to prohibit or limit transnational surrogacy arrangements, the analysis of Indian law in the present paper will provide a useful context within which these countries can effectively regulate surrogacy while safeguarding the surrogate's rights and interests.

Frames

This chapter explores the role of institutional novelty in moderating the experience of gender. It shows how the emergence of the Indian elite law firm has been uniquely shaped by the newness of the work and the organizational structure — as well as a new, neoliberal workforce not found in other professional firms of similar status. As new firms doing new work, these elite law firms are indeed advantaged by being able to escape strong preconceived notions of work and identity. In addition, the newness of the law schools that socialize these firms' workers contribute to the firms' multi-layered advantage, an advantage not enjoyed by other firms that are similarly structured by globalization but that draw their workforce from more long-established educational institutions. Ultimately, the chapter demonstrates how globalization and class come together to renegotiate traditional assumptions of gender and the framework of an ideal worker. It argues that the gender outcomes in these firms result not from a movement for gender equality, but instead from the emergence of the Indian law firm as a new site of high-prestige global labor.