Articles
"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...
Rights Of The Victim/Complainant – In Respect To S. 301 CrPC
There has been a recent rise in the number of cases triable by the sessions court which is leading to more burden of cases for the public prosecutor and therefore, the rights and interests of victims are not getting adequate attention. .The accused, on the other hand has the option of choosing his own lawyer under Section 303 of the Criminal Procedure Code,1973[1] (hereinafter referred to as the 'Code') which reads as,"Any person accused of an offence before a Criminal Court, or against...
Prosecution In Delhi Riots Case (Courts Must Call Its Friends To Protect This Prosecution)
The Citizenship Amendment Act (Bill) protests, also known as CAA Protest or CAB Protest, occurred after the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) was enacted by the Government of India on 12 December 2019. The move sparked a widespread national and overseas protests against the act and its associated proposal of a National Register of Citizens (NRC). The protests broke out rapidly across the country, although the concerns of the protesters varied at different places. There were petitions ...
Uttarakhand HC's Decision In 'Bhuwan Chandra Pandey v. UOI': A Much Needed Beacon For Complainants In Sexual Harassment Inquiries
It has been more than two decades since the Supreme Court of India in Vishaka v. State of Rajasthan, AIR 1997 SC 301, laid down the famous 'Vishaka guidelines', which inter alia, provided for the creation of an internal complaints mechanism for inquiring into complaints of sexual harassment by women employees. The Court had also recommended that the Central and State governments adopt legislation, to ensure that employers in the private sector comply with the guidelines. However it was...
Enforcing A Law That Wasn't: The Consumer Protection Act, 2019
As many lawyers would testify, strange things can happen when facts meet law, the post pandemic world seems to be the world of even "stranger things". This incident shows that the world was not any less strange even before the pandemic, it also shows that law does not necessarily need facts to create peculiar, unusual situations; subjective interpretations regarding the operation of the law itself are enough to enforce a law that wasn't. The Consumer Protection Act, 2019 was passed on...