in partnership with the South Asia Center, South Asia Studies Dept & Dept of History
About the Seminar:
Following the Emergency and through the 1980s, a new generation of lawyers began to litigate and craft legal responses to “take suffering seriously” and bring the concerns of social movements to court. Representing victims of caste and communal violence, environmental disasters, prisoners, residents of women's shelters, slum dwellers, bonded laborers, consumers, and women, these lawyers formed new organizations, developed new tactics and strategies, and generated India's public interest jurisprudence. At a time when public interest litigations (PILs) are criticized for expanding judicial power at the cost of public interest, or seen as, at best, an establishment revolt, this seminar attempts to reexamine the debate by focusing on the labor and craft of lawyering.
About the Speaker:
Rohit De is an Associate Professor of History at Yale University, and a lawyer and a historian of South Asia and the British common law world. He is the author of A People's Constitution: The Everyday Life of Law in the Indian Republic (Princeton University Press, 2018). His second book, Assembling India's Constitution (forthcoming, 2024) co-authored with Ornit Shani, examines how thousands of ordinary Indians read, deliberated, debated, and substantially engaged with the anticipated constitution at the time of its writing. Supported by a Carnegie Fellowship he is currently working on a history of human rights and civil liberties lawyering across the decolonizing world.