Columns

By Vivek K Agnihotri On February 17, 2022, Om Birla, Speaker, Lok Sabha, rued the fact that the number of sittings of the legislature was declining and half of the available time was lost in disru...

Poetry sometimes is reflected in legal prose. Justice, like equality and democracy, is a word of ambiguous import and possesses a basic absolute meaning and plural relativist meaning(s).

By Dilip Bobb New Delhi is caught in a cleft stick over the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It has close military ties with Moscow which it would be unwilling to jeopardize, and there are other reas...

By Kenneth Tiven in Washington The Russian military attack against Ukraine came overnight by land, sea and air, with Russian hackers attacking internet sites and spreading disinformation. There is...

Unfriendly clauses in business laws have grown drastically in recent times. If India has to go up World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business Index, there should be a master document citing all compliance obligations for each product.

On February 17, 2022, the Supreme Court set aside the Punjab and Haryana High Court order staying the controversial law of the government of Haryana providing for 75% reservation for the local youth in private sector jobs paying less than Rs 30,000 a month. The Court observed that the High Court had not given sufficient reasons for stopping the Haryana law in its tracks. Without going into the merits of the matter, the Court ordered that the High Court should decide the petition before it expeditiously and not later than a period of four weeks. At the same time, the Court directed the state government not to take any “coercive steps” against employers for violating the Haryana State Employment of Local Candidates Act, 2020.

Our Constitution is a constructive one. There is no room for absolutism. There is no space for anarchy. Sometimes it is argued, though, in a different context, that one can be a ‘rational anarchist’, but the said term has no term in the constitutional governance and the rule of law. Fulfilment of constitutional idealism ostracizing anything that is not permissible by the language of the provisions of the Constitution and showing to its spirit and silence with a sense of reawakening to the vision of the great living document is, in fact, constitutional renaissance,” observed Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra in his judgment in the famous Delhi government case in 2018.

A case of a woman claiming she was “gang raped” after entering Facebook’s Metaverse has shown the need for laws in 3D virtual worlds. Digital dignity too should be structured around human dignity.

Protests by students over the hijab should be handled sensitively. It would do everyone good to read the National Education Policy which says that the aim of education is to develop constitutional values.

The Tamil Nadu assembly passed the NEET Exemption Bill once again without accepting the suggestions offered by Governor RN Ravi a few weeks ago. The governor had returned the Bill to the assembly for its reconsideration after keeping it pending for around four months. Even the Supreme Court had held the NEET scheme to be in complete conformity with the Constitution as it addresses the issues of social justice.