Amazon v. Amway: Managing Conflicts and a Case for Balancing Safeguards (Part 2)

Eashan Ghosh & Afzal B. Khan In Part 1 of this essay, we offered a background to the Amway claims and assessed the issue of consent of direct selling entities to subsequent third party sales of their products. In Part 2, we explore a second issue: whether and under what conditions direct selling entities can oppose commercial dealing of their products by third party sellers under the considerably trickier statutory demands of the Trade Marks Act. We square off these competing...

Free Speech And Expression At NIFT: The NIFT Social Media Policy, 2020

In July 2020, The National Institute of Fashion Technology, popularly known as "NIFT", imposed its NIFT Social Media Policy, 2020 on its students. The Policy comes right after the institution has hiked its fee and it therefore, prevents students from commenting upon on the institute's action in any manner, thereby censoring the students. However, the examination of the said Policy remains absent from the eye of the fundamental rights of the students awarded through the right to freedom of...

Special Immunity To Prime Minister Violating Basic Structure - Remembering 39th Constitution Amendment On Its 45th Anniversary

10 August 2020, marks the 45th anniversary of the Constitution (Thirty-Ninth Amendment) Act, 1975. The Constitutional Amendment was passed during the infamous Emergency in India, with the aim of nullifying the Allahabad High Court's judgment which had quashed Mrs. Indira Gandhi's election on grounds of electoral malpractice. The Amendment took away the power of the Supreme Court to try electoral disputes concerning the President and Vice-President and vested this power in a separate...

The Distinction Between "Cognizable Offence" And "The Curial Act Of Taking Cognizance Of An Offence" [Read Attachment]

I retired from the High Court of Kerala in the year 2012. During my tenure as a Judge in the High Court all the Chief Justices while fixing the roster, were giving me mostly criminal jurisdictions and I have now metamorphosed into a confirmed criminal, although as a lawyer, I was practicing exclusively on the civil side. While I was convalescing after an influenza during the COVID-19 lockdown period, Advocate Mr. Shyam Padman from Calicut sent me a message inviting me to render a lecture ...

The Supreme Court Judge Who Was Jailed By Government Of India

The States Reorganisation Act, 1956 saw major reform of the internal boundaries of India, with States being drawn up on linguistic lines. The state of Kerala, as we know it today, came into existence on November 1, 1956, and with it, in 1957, came the first democratically elected Communist Government in India (and probably only the second in the world), with E.M.S. Namboodiripad (popularly known as EMS) at the helm – a fact with which I became acquainted only recently. Out of curiosity, I...

"Mind Your Illness": An Appeal To The Legal Profession

The past decade has seen changes in the conversation around mental health in India. More, but not enough, people seem to acknowledge its existence and experience. For a profession deeply immersed in its own ecosystem, the conversation around mental health of lawyers is low on the list of professional priorities. We in the legal profession wear our resilience like an armour—perhaps it has something to do with the inherently adversarial nature of the business. Thick skin is valourized and...

Law On Reels: 'Just Mercy'- A Poignant Tale Of Racial Injustice

"Hopelessness is the enemy of justice. Hope allows us to push forward, even when the truth is distorted by the people in power. It allows us to stand up when they tell us to sit down, and to speak when they say be quiet." -Bryan Stevenson Based on the novel titled "A story of Justice and Redemption" by Bryan Stevenson, the movie "Just Mercy" explicitly brings out the predicaments, controversies and the contentions that are often suppressed by the system engulfing all of us. The ...

Amazon v. Amway: Managing Conflicts and a Case for Balancing Safeguards (Part 1)

Summary The Amazon v. Amway dispute before the Delhi High Court in January 2020 raised some fascinating legal conflicts. At its conclusion, the Court rejected Amway's claim for an interim injunction, thus undercutting a detailed judgment in Amway's favour by the court of first instance. Since the dispute implicated the high-profile direct selling and the e-commerce industries, the outcome was bound to be a significant one. The decision is of considerable interest to Indian law,...

Covid 19 And Lockdown Of Human Rights

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has insisted on countries adopting a population-wide containment strategy for Covid-19. In March when countries were deciding on what type of response to take to the pandemic, the WHO repeatedly said that mitigation measures will not do. Mitigation being measures to contain the virus within cluster outbreaks, as we are now doing in many cities in India. The Director General of the WHO, Tedros Adhanom, repeatedly insisted that there must be an "all-of-society"...

Kerala Twin Tragedies : HC Judge Pays Tribute To Victims

(Twin tragedies struck Kerala on Friday, August 7. Keralites woke up to the tragic news of a landslide in Rajamala, Munnar, which killed 23 people (as per latest reports), who were workers in the tea plantations. The disaster happened while they were sleeping in their quarters. At night, news of another tragedy came from Kozhikode airport, about the crash of an Air India flight, which was bringing expatriates from Dubai as part of Vande Bharat mission. Justice Devan Ramachandran, judge of...

EIA Draft Notification 2020: Of Licensing The Damage And Silencing The Voices

The EIA Draft Notification, 2020 begins with tall claims of making the process of Environment Impact Assessment "more transparent and expedient", but the measures it propounds in the following pages make it abundantly clear that expediency is being prioritized at the cost of transparency. The draft makes the process more opaque by considerably reducing public consultation and ends up not just monetising, but to a great extent, incentivising environmental damage by legitimizing post-facto...

My Jekyll And Hyde Encounters

I have spent the 'lockdown' nights reading detective fiction and watching crime shows on Netflix. I'm partial to that genre: British crime dramas, and thrillers by John Le Carre (and only him). Sometimes, in an effort to expand my worldview, I watch American police procedurals too, or the Indian Patal-lok more recently, which is more a commentary on the state of the nation. However as the pandemic stretches indefinitely, and as summer peaks, I find myself turning to traditionally twisty...