The Transformative Constitution

The Transformative Constitution
Author: Gautam Bhatia
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 544
Release: 2019-02-28
Genre: Law
ISBN: 9353026857

| Shortlisted for the Tata Literature Live Non-fiction Book of the Year Award and Hindu Prize for Non-fiction | We think of the Indian Constitution as a founding document, embodying a moment of profound transformation from being ruled to becoming a nation of free and equal citizenship. Yet the working of the Constitution over the last seven decades has often failed to fulfil that transformative promise.Not only have successive Parliaments failed to repeal colonial-era laws that are inconsistent with the principles of the Constitution, but constitutional challenges to these laws have also failed before the courts. Indeed, in numerous cases, the Supreme Court has used colonial-era laws to cut down or weaken the fundamental rights. The Transformative Constitution by Gautam Bhatia draws on pre-Independence legal and political history to argue that the Constitution was intended to transform not merely the political status of Indians from subjects to citizens, but also the social relationships on which legal and political structures rested. He advances a novel vision of the Constitution, and of constitutional interpretation, which is faithful to its text, structure and history, and above all to its overarching commitment to political and social transformation.

Transformative Constitutionalism in Latin America

Transformative Constitutionalism in Latin America
Author: Armin von Bogdandy
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 465
Release: 2017-06-16
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0192515462

This ground-breaking collection of essays outlines and explains the unique development of Latin American jurisprudence. It introduces the idea of the Ius Constitutionale Commune en América Latina (ICCAL), an original Latin American path of transformative constitutionalism, to an Anglophone audience for the first time. It charts the key developments that have transformed the region and assesses the success of the constitutional projects that followed a period of authoritarian regimes in Latin America. Coined by scholars who have been documenting, conceptualizing, and comparing the development of Latin American public law for more than a decade, the term ICCAL encompasses themes that cross national borders and legal fields, taking in constitutional law, administrative law, general public international law, regional integration law, human rights, and investment law. Not only does this volume map the legal landscape, it also suggests measures to improve society via due legal process and a rights-based, supranational and regionally rooted constitutionalism. The editors contend that with the strengthening of democracy, the rule of law, and human rights, common problems such as the exclusion of wide sectors of the population from having a say in government, as well as corruption, hyper-presidentialism, and the weak normativity of the law can be combatted more effectively in future.

Socio-economic Rights

Socio-economic Rights
Author: Sandra Liebenberg
Publisher: Juta and Company Ltd
Total Pages: 572
Release: 2010
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780702184802

Drawing on a wide range of interdisciplinary resources, this scholarly work provides an in-depth and thorough analysis of the socio-economic rights jurisprudence of the newly democratic South Africa. The book explores how the judicial interpretation and enforcement of socio-economic rights can be more responsive to the conditions of systemic poverty and inequality characterising South African society. Based on meticulous research, the work marries legal analysis with perspectives from political philosophy and democratic theory.

Global Gender Constitutionalism and Women's Citizenship

Global Gender Constitutionalism and Women's Citizenship
Author: Ruth Rubio-Marin
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 405
Release: 2022-10-06
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1107177022

Considers whether and how constitutions have affirmed women's equal citizenship status, from the birth of constitutionalism to the present.

A People's Constitution

A People's Constitution
Author: Rohit De
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 308
Release: 2020-08-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 0691210381

It has long been contended that the Indian Constitution of 1950, a document in English created by elite consensus, has had little influence on India’s greater population. Drawing upon the previously unexplored records of the Supreme Court of India, A People’s Constitution upends this narrative and shows how the Constitution actually transformed the daily lives of citizens in profound and lasting ways. This remarkable legal process was led by individuals on the margins of society, and Rohit De looks at how drinkers, smugglers, petty vendors, butchers, and prostitutes—all despised minorities—shaped the constitutional culture. The Constitution came alive in the popular imagination so much that ordinary people attributed meaning to its existence, took recourse to it, and argued with it. Focusing on the use of constitutional remedies by citizens against new state regulations seeking to reshape the society and economy, De illustrates how laws and policies were frequently undone or renegotiated from below using the state’s own procedures. De examines four important cases that set legal precedents: a Parsi journalist’s contestation of new alcohol prohibition laws, Marwari petty traders’ challenge to the system of commodity control, Muslim butchers’ petition against cow protection laws, and sex workers’ battle to protect their right to practice prostitution. Exploring how the Indian Constitution of 1950 enfranchised the largest population in the world, A People’s Constitution considers the ways that ordinary citizens produced, through litigation, alternative ethical models of citizenship.

India’s Founding Moment

India’s Founding Moment
Author: Madhav Khosla
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2020-02-04
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0674980875

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.

Towards Juristocracy

Towards Juristocracy
Author: Ran Hirschl
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2009-06-30
Genre: Law
ISBN: 9780674038677

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.