Courting the People - Public Interest Litigation in Post-Emergency India

This book studies the political role that public interest litigation has come to play in contemporary India.

List of contents

Acknowledgements; Introduction; 1. Competing populisms: revisiting the origins of public interest litigation in India; 2. The case that felled a city: a public interest litigation with nine lives; 3. Public interest litigation as a slum demolition machine; 4. Good judges, bad judges: critical discourses on public interest litigation in India; Conclusion: the procedural is political; Index.

About the author

Anuj Bhuwania teaches at the Department of Sociology at South Asian University, New Delhi. His research interests are legal anthropology, anthropology of media, public law, post-colonial Indian politics, anthropology of human rights and criminal justice and policing.

Summary

This book shows how public interest litigation (PIL) grants appellate courts flexibility in procedure, allowing them to manoeuvre themselves into positions of overweening authority. It locates the political challenges that PIL uses in its very process, arguing that its fundamentally protean nature stems from its mimicry of ideas of popular justice.

Product details

• Authors: Anuj Bhuwania, Anuj (South Asian University Bhuwania, Bhuwania Anuj
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press ELT
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 31.01.2017
• EAN: 9781107147454
• ISBN: 978-1-107-14745-4
• No. of pages: 166
• Series: South Asia in the Social Sciences; South Asia in the Social Scien; South Asia in the Social Sciences; South Asia in the Social Scien
• Subjects: Social sciences, law, business > Law > International law, foreign law; SOCIAL SCIENCE / Sociology / General, Human rights & civil liberties law, India, c 1970 to c 1980, Law & society, Law and society, sociology of law