[Editor’s Note: This is part of the joint I-CONnect/IACL-AIDC Blog symposium on “towering judges,” which emerged from a conference held earlier this year at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, organized by Professors Rehan Abeyratne (CUHK) and Iddo Porat (CLB). The author in this post formed part of a panel on “Towering Judges in Transformative Constitutions.” The introduction to
In Defence of Constitutionalism
—Dr. Rohit De, Assistant Professor at Yale University, and Dr. Tarunabh Khaitan, Associate Professor at the Universities of Oxford and Melbourne On the 12th of January 2018, four of the five senior-most judges of the Indian Supreme Court who constitute its ‘collegium’ held an unprecedented joint press conference. They released an open letter they had written
Triple Talaq: Still Not Unconstitutional in India
–Sachin Dhawan, Assistant Professor, Jindal Global Law School, India The famous American lawyer and judge Thurgood Marshall used to tell his judicial clerks that the most important principle in law is the rule of five. In its absence, all else was irrelevant. He was referring to the number of judges required to constitute a majority
The Constitutional Burden of the Global Imagination (I-CONnect Column)
—Menaka Guruswamy, Fellow, Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin and Advocate, Supreme Court of India [Editor’s note: This is one of our biweekly I-CONnect columns. Columns, while scholarly in accordance with the tone of the blog and about the same length as a normal blog post, are a bit more “op-ed” in nature than standard posts. For more
The Indian Supreme Court Declines to Revisit its Docket Crisis: The Most Important Recent Order That You’ve Never Heard of
–Rishad A. Chowdhury, J.S.D Candidate, The University of Chicago Law School The Supreme Court of India’s (SCI’s) recent decision striking down the National Judicial Appointments Commission (NJAC) deservedly drew attention from those interested in Indian (and comparative) constitutional law. But in terms of true (potential) impact on the fundamental character of the SCI, even the
Judicial Supremacy, not Independence, Upheld in NJAC Judgment
—Rehan Abeyratne, Jindal Global Law School Last week, the Supreme Court of India issued a landmark judgment holding the National Judicial Appointments Commission (NJAC) unconstitutional. As Chintan Chandrachud has explained in detail on I-CONnect, the Court held that the NJAC violated the Indian Constitution’s “basic structure” by restricting the independence of the judiciary. The Court
Video Interview: Judicial Appointments in India, Featuring Nick Robinson
—Richard Albert, Boston College Law School In this latest installment of our new video interview series at I-CONnect, I interview Nick Robinson on the subject of judicial appointments in India. In the interview, we discuss how judicial appointment will change under 121st amendment to the Indian Constitution, which will constitutionalize the National Judicial Appointments Commission. We explore how
Orthodox in the Extreme: India’s Same-Sex Jurisprudence in Comparative Perspective
—Rehan Abeyratne (Jindal Global Law School) and Nilesh Sinha (Syracuse University) Last week, the Indian Supreme Court issued a controversial ruling in Koushal v. Naz Foundation. It upheld the constitutionality of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, which criminalizes “carnal intercourse against the order of nature.” In so doing, it reversed a 2009 Delhi High
How Precedent Travels
–Sam Halabi, University of Tulsa In a recent Article forthcoming in the Notre Dame Journal of International and Comparative Law, “Constitutional Borrowing as Jurisprudential and Political Doctrine in Shri DK Basu v. State of West Bengal”, I explore one aspect of the countermajoritarian difficulty engendered by use of foreign precedent. Usually, that concern is articulated
