Download or read book Justice Judocracy and Democracy in India written by Sudhanshu Ranjan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-03-21 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers an innovative approach to studying ‘judicial activism’ in the Indian context in tracing its history and relevance since 1773. While discussing the varying roles of the judiciary, it delineates the boundaries of different organs of the State — judiciary, executive and legislature — and highlights the points where these boundaries have been breached, especially through judicial interventions in parliamentary affairs and their role in governance and policy. Including a fascinating range of sources such as legal cases, books, newspapers, periodicals, lectures, historical texts and records, the author presents the complex sides of the arguments persuasively, and contributes to new ways of understanding the functioning of the judiciary in India. This paperback edition, with a new Afterword, updates the debates around the raging questions facing the Indian judiciary. It will be of great interest to students and scholars of law, political science and history, as well as legal practitioners and the general reader.
Download or read book Judicial Power written by Christine Landfried and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-02-07 with total page 411 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The power of national and transnational constitutional courts to issue binding rulings in interpreting the constitution or an international treaty has been endlessly discussed. What does it mean for democratic governance that non-elected judges influence politics and policies? The authors of Judicial Power - legal scholars, political scientists, and judges - take a fresh look at this problem. To date, research has concentrated on the legitimacy, or the effectiveness, or specific decision-making methods of constitutional courts. By contrast, the authors here explore the relationship among these three factors. This book presents the hypothesis that judicial review allows for a method of reflecting on social integration that differs from political methods, and, precisely because of the difference between judicial and political decision-making, strengthens democratic governance. This hypothesis is tested in case studies on the role of constitutional courts in political transformations, on the methods of these courts, and on transnational judicial interactions.
Download or read book How to Save a Constitutional Democracy written by Tom Ginsburg and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-10-05 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Democracies are in danger. Around the world, a rising wave of populist leaders threatens to erode the core structures of democratic self-rule. In the United States, the tenure of Donald Trump has seemed decisive turning point for many. What kind of president intimidates jurors, calls the news media the “enemy of the American people,” and seeks foreign assistance investigating domestic political rivals? Whatever one thinks of President Trump, many think the Constitution will safeguard us from lasting damage. But is that assumption justified? How to Save a Constitutional Democracy mounts an urgent argument that we can no longer afford to be complacent. Drawing on a rich array of other countries’ experiences with democratic backsliding, Tom Ginsburg and Aziz Z. Huq show how constitutional rules can both hinder and hasten the decline of democratic institutions. The checks and balances of the federal government, a robust civil society and media, and individual rights—such as those enshrined in the First Amendment—often fail as bulwarks against democratic decline. The sobering reality for the United States, Ginsburg and Huq contend, is that the Constitution’s design makes democratic erosion more, not less, likely. Its structural rigidity has had unforeseen consequence—leaving the presidency weakly regulated and empowering the Supreme Court conjure up doctrines that ultimately facilitate rather than inhibit rights violations. Even the bright spots in the Constitution—the First Amendment, for example—may have perverse consequences in the hands of a deft communicator who can degrade the public sphere by wielding hateful language banned in many other democracies. We—and the rest of the world—can do better. The authors conclude by laying out practical steps for how laws and constitutional design can play a more positive role in managing the risk of democratic decline.
Download or read book India s Founding Moment written by Madhav Khosla and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2020-02-04 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An Economist Best Book of the Year How India’s Constitution came into being and instituted democracy after independence from British rule. Britain’s justification for colonial rule in India stressed the impossibility of Indian self-government. And the empire did its best to ensure this was the case, impoverishing Indian subjects and doing little to improve their socioeconomic reality. So when independence came, the cultivation of democratic citizenship was a foremost challenge. Madhav Khosla explores the means India’s founders used to foster a democratic ethos. They knew the people would need to learn ways of citizenship, but the path to education did not lie in rule by a superior class of men, as the British insisted. Rather, it rested on the creation of a self-sustaining politics. The makers of the Indian Constitution instituted universal suffrage amid poverty, illiteracy, social heterogeneity, and centuries of tradition. They crafted a constitutional system that could respond to the problem of democratization under the most inhospitable conditions. On January 26, 1950, the Indian Constitution—the longest in the world—came into effect. More than half of the world’s constitutions have been written in the past three decades. Unlike the constitutional revolutions of the late eighteenth century, these contemporary revolutions have occurred in countries characterized by low levels of economic growth and education, where voting populations are deeply divided by race, religion, and ethnicity. And these countries have democratized at once, not gradually. The events and ideas of India’s Founding Moment offer a natural reference point for these nations where democracy and constitutionalism have arrived simultaneously, and they remind us of the promise and challenge of self-rule today.
Download or read book A Qualified Hope written by Gerald N. Rosenberg and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-08-29 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines whether the Indian Supreme Court can produce progressive social change and improve the lives of the relatively disadvantaged.
Download or read book Can Courts be Bulwarks of Democracy written by Jeffrey K. Staton and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-03-31 with total page 173 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues that independent courts can defend democracy by encouraging political elites to more prudently exercise their powers.
Download or read book Democracy and Distrust written by John Hart Ely and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1981-08-15 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This powerfully argued appraisal of judicial review may change the face of American law. Written for layman and scholar alike, the book addresses one of the most important issues facing Americans today: within what guidelines shall the Supreme Court apply the strictures of the Constitution to the complexities of modern life? Until now legal experts have proposed two basic approaches to the Constitution. The first, “interpretivism,” maintains that we should stick as closely as possible to what is explicit in the document itself. The second, predominant in recent academic theorizing, argues that the courts should be guided by what they see as the fundamental values of American society. John Hart Ely demonstrates that both of these approaches are inherently incomplete and inadequate. Democracy and Distrust sets forth a new and persuasive basis for determining the role of the Supreme Court today. Ely’s proposal is centered on the view that the Court should devote itself to assuring majority governance while protecting minority rights. “The Constitution,” he writes, “has proceeded from the sensible assumption that an effective majority will not unreasonably threaten its own rights, and has sought to assure that such a majority not systematically treat others less well than it treats itself. It has done so by structuring decision processes at all levels in an attempt to ensure, first, that everyone’s interests will be represented when decisions are made, and second, that the application of those decisions will not be manipulated so as to reintroduce in practice the sort of discrimination that is impermissible in theory.” Thus, Ely’s emphasis is on the procedural side of due process, on the preservation of governmental structure rather than on the recognition of elusive social values. At the same time, his approach is free of interpretivism’s rigidity because it is fully responsive to the changing wishes of a popular majority. Consequently, his book will have a profound impact on legal opinion at all levels—from experts in constitutional law, to lawyers with general practices, to concerned citizens watching the bewildering changes in American law.
Download or read book Unstable Constitutionalism written by Mark Tushnet and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-09-17 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines constitutional law and practice in five South Asian countries: India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Bangladesh.
Download or read book To Kill A Democracy written by Debasish Roy Chowdhury and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-06-24 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: India is heralded as the world's largest democracy. Yet, there is now growing alarm about its democratic health. To Kill a Democracy gets to the heart of the matter. Combining poignant life stories with sharp scholarly insight, it rejects the belief that India was once a beacon of democracy but is now being ruined by the destructive forces of Modi-style populism. The book details the much deeper historical roots of the present-day assaults on civil liberties and democratic institutions. Democracy, the authors also argue, is much more than elections and the separation of powers. It is a whole way of life lived in dignity, and that is why they pay special attention to the decaying social foundations of Indian democracy. In compelling fashion, the book describes daily struggles for survival and explains how lived social injustices and unfreedoms rob Indian elections of their meaning, while at the same time feeding the decadence and iron-fisted rule of its governing institutions. Much more than a book about India, To Kill A Democracy argues that what is happening in the country is globally important, and not just because every third person living in a democracy is an Indian. It shows that when democracies rack and ruin their social foundations, they don't just kill off the spirit and substance of democracy. They lay the foundations for despotism.
Download or read book Courts and Democracies in Asia written by Po Jen Yap and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-09-28 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book illuminates how law and politics interact in the judicial doctrines and explores how democracy sustains and is sustained by the exercise of judicial power.
Download or read book The Vernacularisation of Democracy written by Lucia Michelutti and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2020-11-29 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book is an ethnographic exploration of how ‘democracy’ takes social and cultural roots in India and in the process shapes the nature of popular politics. It centres on a historically marginalised caste who in recent years has become one of the most assertive and politically powerful communities in North India: the Yadavs. The Vernacularisation of Democracy is a vivid account of how Indian popular democracy works on the ground. Challenging conventional theories of democratisation the book shows how the political upsurge of 'the lower orders' is situated within a wider process of the vernacularisation of democratic politics, referring to the ways in which values and practices of democracy become embedded in particular cultural and social practices, and in the process become entrenched in the consciousness of ordinary people. During the 1990s, Indian democracy witnessed an upsurge in the political participation of lower castes/communities and the emergence of political leaders from humble social backgrounds who present themselves as promoters of social justice for underprivileged communities. Drawing on a large body of archival and ethnographic material the author shows how the analysis of local idioms of caste, kinship, kingship, popular religion, ‘the past’ and politics (‘the vernacular’) inform popular perceptions of the political world and of how the democratic process shapes in turn ‘the vernacular’. This line of enquiry provides a novel framework to understand the unique experience of Indian democracy as well as democratic politics and its meaning in other contemporary post-colonial states. Using as a case study the political ethnography of a powerful northern Indian caste (the Yadavs) and combining ethnographic material with colonial and post-colonial history the book examines the unique experience of Indian popular democracy and provides a framework to analyse popular politics in other parts of the world. The book fills
Download or read book The Deadly Ethnic Riot written by Donald L. Horowitz and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-11-10 with total page 608 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Donald L. Horowitz's comprehensive consideration of the structure and dynamics of ethnic violence is the first full-scale, comparative study of what the author terms the deadly ethnic riot—an intense, sudden, lethal attack by civilian members of one ethnic group on civilian members of another ethnic group. Serious, frequent, and destabilizing, these events result in large numbers of casualties. Horowitz examines approximately 150 such riots in about fifty countries, mainly in Asia, Africa, and the former Soviet Union, as well as fifty control cases. With its deep and thorough scholarship, incisive analysis, and profound insights, The Deadly Ethnic Riot will become the definitive work on its subject. Furious and sadistic, the riot is nevertheless directed against a precisely specified class of targets and conducted with considerable circumspection. Horowitz scrutinizes target choices, participants and organization, the timing and supporting conditions for the violence, the nature of the events that precede the riot, the prevalence of atrocities during the violence, the location and diffusion of riots, and the aims and effects of riot behavior. He finds that the deadly ethnic riot is a highly patterned but emotional event that tends to occur during times of political uncertainty. He also discusses the crucial role of rumor in triggering riots, the surprisingly limited role of deliberate organization, and the striking lack of remorse exhibited by participants. Horowitz writes clearly and eloquently without compromising the complexity of his subject. With impressive analytical skill, he takes up the important challenge of explaining phenomena that are at once passionate and calculative.
Download or read book Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life written by Ashutosh Varshney and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2008-10-01 with total page 516 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What kinds of civic ties between different ethnic communities can contain, or even prevent, ethnic violence? This book draws on new research on Hindu-Muslim conflict in India to address this important question. Ashutosh Varshney examines three pairs of Indian cities—one city in each pair with a history of communal violence, the other with a history of relative communal harmony—to discern why violence between Hindus and Muslims occurs in some situations but not others. His findings will be of strong interest to scholars, politicians, and policymakers of South Asia, but the implications of his study have theoretical and practical relevance for a broad range of multiethnic societies in other areas of the world as well. The book focuses on the networks of civic engagement that bring Hindu and Muslim urban communities together. Strong associational forms of civic engagement, such as integrated business organizations, trade unions, political parties, and professional associations, are able to control outbreaks of ethnic violence, Varshney shows. Vigorous and communally integrated associational life can serve as an agent of peace by restraining those, including powerful politicians, who would polarize Hindus and Muslims along communal lines.
Download or read book The Constitution of India written by Arun K Thiruvengadam and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-12-28 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides an overview of the content and functioning of the Indian Constitution, with an emphasis on the broader socio-political context. It focuses on the overarching principles and the main institutions of constitutional governance that the world's longest written constitution inaugurated in 1950. The nine chapters of the book deal with specific aspects of the Indian constitutional tradition as it has evolved across seven decades of India's existence as an independent nation. Beginning with the pre-history of the Constitution and its making, the book moves onto an examination of the structural features and actual operation of the Constitution's principal governance institutions. These include the executive and the parliament, the institutions of federalism and local government, and the judiciary. An unusual feature of Indian constitutionalism that is highlighted here is the role played by technocratic institutions such as the Election Commission, the Comptroller and Auditor General, and a set of new regulatory institutions, most of which were created during the 1990s. A considerable portion of the book evaluates issues relating to constitutional rights, directive principles and the constitutional regulation of multiple forms of identity in India. The important issue of constitutional change in India is approached from an atypical perspective. The book employs a narrative form to describe the twists, turns and challenges confronted across nearly seven decades of the working of the constitutional order. It departs from conventional Indian constitutional scholarship in placing less emphasis on constitutional doctrine (as evolved in judicial decisions delivered by the High Courts and the Supreme Court). Instead, the book turns the spotlight on the political bargains and extra-legal developments that have influenced constitutional evolution. Written in accessible prose that avoids undue legal jargon, the book aims at a general audience that is interested in understanding the complex yet fascinating challenges posed by constitutionalism in India. Its unconventional approach to some classic issues will stimulate the more seasoned student of constitutional law and politics.
Download or read book Towards Juristocracy written by Ran Hirschl and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In countries and supranational entities around the globe, constitutional reform has transferred an unprecedented amount of power from representative institutions to judiciaries. The constitutionalization of rights and the establishment of judicial review are widely believed to have benevolent and progressive origins, and significant redistributive, power-diffusing consequences. Ran Hirschl challenges this conventional wisdom. Drawing upon a comprehensive comparative inquiry into the political origins and legal consequences of the recent constitutional revolutions in Canada, Israel, New Zealand, and South Africa, Hirschl shows that the trend toward constitutionalization is hardly driven by politicians' genuine commitment to democracy, social justice, or universal rights. Rather, it is best understood as the product of a strategic interplay among hegemonic yet threatened political elites, influential economic stakeholders, and judicial leaders. This self-interested coalition of legal innovators determines the timing, extent, and nature of constitutional reforms. Hirschl demonstrates that whereas judicial empowerment through constitutionalization has a limited impact on advancing progressive notions of distributive justice, it has a transformative effect on political discourse. The global trend toward juristocracy, Hirschl argues, is part of a broader process whereby political and economic elites, while they profess support for democracy and sustained development, attempt to insulate policymaking from the vicissitudes of democratic politics.
Download or read book When Crime Pays written by Milan Vaishnav and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2017-01-01 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first thorough study of the co-existence of crime and democratic processes in Indian politics In India, the world's largest democracy, the symbiotic relationship between crime and politics raises complex questions. For instance, how can free and fair democratic processes exist alongside rampant criminality? Why do political parties recruit candidates with reputations for wrongdoing? Why are one-third of state and national legislators elected--and often re-elected--in spite of criminal charges pending against them? In this eye-opening study, political scientist Milan Vaishnav mines a rich array of sources, including fieldwork on political campaigns and interviews with candidates, party workers, and voters, large surveys, and an original database on politicians' backgrounds to offer the first comprehensive study of an issue that has implications for the study of democracy both within and beyond India's borders.
Download or read book Asian Courts in Context written by Jiunn-rong Yeh and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015 with total page 633 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Analyzes courts in fourteen selected Asian jurisdictions to provide the most up-to-date and comprehensive interdisciplinary book available.
