About

I write about the distance between a right as it is written and a right as it is lived. Indian law is often better on paper than its reputation suggests. The failure is usually further down: in a procedure nobody follows, a duty nobody is held to, or a remedy that costs more than the thing it was meant to protect. That gap is widest for the people least able to complain about it, which is the reason it stays open.

So I work by asking questions rather than restating what has already been said. What does the section actually say? Who was supposed to act on it, and what happens to them if they did not? Has anyone checked whether the judgment everybody cites for the proposition still holds it? The answers are usually duller, and more damning, than the commentary built on top of them.

But who is to guard the guards themselves?

Juvenal, Satires, VI

The subjects are child rights and women’s rights, the profession that is supposed to enforce them, and the constitutional question underneath all of it: what the state owes the people it governs, and what those people can actually do when it fails them. Synthetic sexual abuse imagery of children. Guardianship law that still puts the father first. Maintenance arrears a court was told had lapsed when they never had. The statutory incoherence that lets a person be a child under one Indian law and an adult under the next.

On this site that work falls into six strands: constitutional law, which runs underneath the rest; women’s rights, chiefly maintenance, cruelty and guardianship; child rights, and particularly the child’s right to be heard in proceedings about her own life; the legal profession, and specifically who is admitted to it, who regulates it, and the standards it holds itself to; cyber law, where statutory language written for one technology is asked to govern another; and international and other, for the questions that do not sit inside any of them.

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