Volume 9, Issue IV / 2026

Live-in relationships are gaining acceptance as a means of forming personal bonds, reflecting changing social values. Their legal recognition, however, remains fragmented and has developed largely through the Indian courts rather than through comprehensive legislation. Although the Supreme Court has recognised the constitutional right of consenting adults to cohabit and has extended limited protection to women and children through the interpretative application of statutes such as the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005, questions of succession, property rights, and financial obligation remain unaddressed by any comprehensive statutory measure. This article evaluates the Indian legal position on live-in relationships and considers whether selected features of French and United Kingdom law might inform the development of more effective provisions. Adopting a doctrinal and comparative methodology, it analyses leading decisions of the Supreme Court of India, the statutory framework of the French Civil Solidarity Pact (PACS), and the common law approach to cohabitation in the United Kingdom. The comparison shows that the French framework affords greater stability and predictability through voluntary statutory recognition, whereas the United Kingdom relies largely on judicial interpretation and property law and offers comparatively limited protection. The article argues that India's continued reliance on judicial pronouncements produces divergent outcomes, and that a clearly defined statutory framework could resolve recurring difficulties without impinging upon the institution of marriage. It cautions against the wholesale adoption of foreign law and proposes the selective incorporation of features such as voluntary recognition, clearly defined financial obligations, and standards for genuine long-term cohabitation, so as to enhance legal certainty, protect vulnerable partners, particularly women and children, secure harmony with constitutional values and social realities, and preserve the distinct legal status of marriage.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has emerged as a transformative force across various sectors, including the legal system. In India, the integration of AI into judicial administration, legal practice, dispute resolution, and legal education presents significant opportunities for improving efficiency, accessibility, and transparency in the administration of justice. AI-enabled technologies such as machine learning, natural language processing, predictive analytics, and legal chatbots are increasingly being utilized for legal research, case management, translation services, and digital court processes. The Supreme Court of India has introduced initiatives such as SUVAS, SUPACE, and e-Courts projects to modernize judicial functions and address the persistent problem of case pendency. However, the rapid adoption of AI also raises critical concerns relating to algorithmic bias, accountability, transparency, data privacy, cybersecurity, ethical standards, and constitutional safeguards. The absence of a comprehensive legislative framework specifically regulating AI in the legal sector creates uncertainties regarding liability, judicial independence, and due process. This paper critically examines the opportunities and challenges associated with AI in the Indian legal system and proposes a balanced regulatory framework that encourages technological innovation while preserving fundamental legal principles and human rights. It argues that AI should function as an assistive mechanism rather than a substitute for human judicial reasoning.

The rapid transition of deep seabed mining from exploration to commercial exploitation has produced deep systemic and doctrinal friction within the law of the sea. At the heart of this conflict lies the tension between the common heritage of mankind (CHM) principle, which designates the international seabed Area as a collective commons to be managed for the benefit of humanity, and the commercial pressures driving private extraction. This tension is exacerbated by the strategic conduct of multinational corporate groups, which exploit the limited regulatory capacity of Small Island Developing States (SIDS) serving as sponsoring states of convenience. Furthermore, the emergence of parallel, unilateral mining routes outside the ambit of UNCLOS threatens the exclusivity of the international regime. Crucially, the maturing standard of environmental due diligence under public international law demands vigilance and scientific certainty before any activity carrying severe or irreversible ecological risk may proceed. This article evaluates the compatibility of commercial deep seabed mining with the CHM principle under Part XI of UNCLOS, focusing on the landmark 2026 filings before the ITLOS Seabed Disputes Chamber and analysing how the corporate unity problem exposes the limitations of formalistic sponsorship regimes.

Female genital mutilation (FGM) persists as one of the gravest violations of the bodily integrity, dignity, and autonomy of women and girls, affecting more than 230 million worldwide. This article situates FGM not as a cultural or religious question but as a human rights crisis demanding legal and social response. It surveys the international and regional legal architecture, including CEDAW, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the Convention against Torture, the Maputo Protocol, and the United Kingdom's Female Genital Mutilation Act 2003, alongside leading judicial decisions from the ECOWAS Court, Kenya, and the United Kingdom. It then turns to India, where the practice, known as khafz, endures within the Dawoodi Bohra community despite the absence of a specific prohibitory statute, and examines the pending litigation in Sunita Tiwari v. Union of India. The article argues that eradicating FGM requires legislation reinforced by survivor-led advocacy, community education, and cultural change.

The principle of equality has been a subject of contemporary debate among legal scholars. While some regard it as pragmatic, others maintain that it remains a philosophical concept beset by several hurdles to its realisation. Although the principle of equality before the law is deeply enshrined in the criminal justice system in Cameroon, access to the courts is still impeded by certain procedural lapses. The absence of legal aid, corruption, poverty, language barriers, the status of the Legal Department as a principal party, and the absence of judicial independence are major impediments to achieving equality. The harmonisation of the criminal law throughout the country, effected by the promulgation of the Criminal Procedure Code in 2005, outlawed the disparate elements of the criminal laws hitherto applicable in both regions. This paper critically examines the extent to which the principle of equality is effective in the Cameroon criminal justice system. In so doing, it adopts a qualitative research methodology, the principal research method being the doctrinal method. Although equality is a cardinal principle of the country's justice system, it is undermined in several ways, as illustrated by the procedures of the Special Criminal Court. The main finding is that, notwithstanding the great strides made by the State in securing equality before the law, the principle remains largely ineffective in the criminal justice system, since it proceeds on the basis that everyone should be tried before a competent, fair and impartial tribunal in the determination of a charge against him, and should be treated without bias or discrimination.

The rapid evolution of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) challenges the traditional, anthropocentric foundations of copyright law in India. Under the Copyright Act, 1957, authorship is tied to natural human creators. As AI systems move from being mere tools to autonomous creators, a critical legal lacuna emerges in determining the authorship and ownership of machine-generated works. This study examines the statutory interpretation of "originality" and "skill and judgment" under Sections 2(d), 13, and 17 of the Act. Analysing recent administrative developments before the Copyright Office of India, which require proof of substantial human creative direction, the research evaluates the viability of granting copyright protection to human-prompted or AI-assisted works. It further undertakes a comparative analysis of the approaches adopted in the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union in order to draw regulatory insights. Ultimately, the study argues that existing Indian law is inadequate for governing fully autonomous AI creations, risking either the monopolisation of machine-generated content or its unwarranted relegation to the public domain. The paper proposes a balanced, innovation-friendly legal framework, such as a structured creative control test or sui generis protection, to delineate rights between AI developers, end-users, and human creators, so that copyright law continues to serve its primary goal of promoting progress.

Competition law has always worked after the event. It waits for conduct, then judges it. That habit is now under strain, because digital markets tend to settle on a single winner long before a case can be brought and decided, and a judgment that comes years too late restores little. In response, several jurisdictions have begun to write rules in advance for the largest platforms, prohibiting a defined list of practices without any prior proof of dominance or abuse. This article compares three answers to the same pressure. The European Union has committed to the new model through the Digital Markets Act, whose obligations bind six designated gatekeepers and whose first fines fell in 2025. The United States has kept faith with the older method, litigating hard against Google and Amazon while its legislature debated and then shelved an ex-ante statute. India has occupied the middle ground: it strengthened its existing law in 2023, drafted a Digital Competition Bill closely modelled on the European instrument, and then, on a parliamentary committee's advice, set the draft aside for reconsideration. The article argues that the sounder course is not to choose between the two methods but to pair them, adding narrow forward-looking duties on top of, rather than in place of, ordinary competition law, and it reads the Indian experience against that yardstick.

The passage of the National Anti-Doping (Amendment) Bill, 2025 marks a crucial turning point in India's continuing effort to bring domestic anti-doping enforcement into compliance with the international standards established by the World Anti-Doping Code. Building on the National Anti-Doping Act, 2022, the amendment seeks to address the structural and procedural inadequacies that had previously undermined India's credibility in global sports governance. In addition to incorporating certain provisions of the Code directly into Indian law through a dynamic Schedule, the Bill strengthens the institutional independence of the National Anti-Doping Agency (NADA) and the National Anti-Doping Appeal Panel, harmonises key definitions with international standards and clarifies appellate mechanisms, particularly with regard to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) and the direct appeal rights of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA). This article undertakes an in-depth review of these reforms in order to determine whether they genuinely improve justice, efficiency and compliance, or whether they merely transfer discretion from athletes to the administration. Although the Bill unquestionably improves India's standing in international competition and removes procedural uncertainty, concerns remain about executive overreach, inadequate athlete support channels and the sustainability of laboratory compliance. In conclusion, the article submits that there should be greater parliamentary oversight, access to legal aid for athletes and institutional safeguards to guarantee both global alignment and due process.

How do states use governance as a form of international influence? This paper examines that question through a close analysis of India's evolving engagement with global Artificial Intelligence (AI) governance between 2014 and 2025. Drawing on process tracing and systematic document analysis across multilateral frameworks, policy documents and institutional records, the paper argues that India's engagement with global AI governance reflects an emergent strategy grounded in what it terms Development-Centred AI Diplomacy: the use of domestic digital governance experience as a resource for international norm engagement rather than as a downstream outcome of it. The paper makes two original contributions. First, it develops the concept of Development-Centred AI Diplomacy, which reconceptualises development capacity as a source of international influence rather than merely an objective of global policy. Second, it proposes the RISE Framework (Resources, Institutions, Strategic Coalitions, Entrepreneurial Leadership) as a structured model linking domestic AI capability with sustained multilateral engagement. The findings suggest that India's comparative advantage in AI governance derives less from frontier technological capability than from its experience building scalable, interoperable digital public infrastructure and its demonstrated capacity to shape multilateral agendas through coalition building and policy entrepreneurship. These findings have broader implications for how scholars conceptualise the relationship between domestic digital governance and international influence in the emerging technology era.

Economic statecraft has become a defining feature of contemporary international politics. Trade policy, technology regulation, industrial incentives and financial networks are increasingly used to pursue strategic objectives once reserved for diplomacy or military force. India has not been passive in this shift. Over the past decade, it has deployed trade agreements, technology partnerships, digital public infrastructure, production-linked incentives and development finance as instruments of external engagement, often simultaneously and with deliberate strategic intent. This paper argues that India's contemporary foreign policy is best understood through the lens of economic statecraft. Strategic autonomy has not been abandoned; what has changed is what it means in practice. In an era of fragmented globalisation and intensifying strategic competition, autonomy increasingly requires economic resilience, technological capability and diversified external partnerships, not merely diplomatic independence. Drawing on the literature in International Relations and International Political Economy, the paper demonstrates how trade, technology and finance have become mutually reinforcing instruments of India's external strategy, and how this positions India as an important case for understanding how emerging powers convert economic capability into geopolitical influence.

The growing use of digital technologies has changed the way surveillance operates in India. While legal discussion continues to focus on privacy as the primary concern, recent developments suggest a deeper shift: from simple data collection to the large-scale profiling of individuals. Initiatives such as Aadhaar, together with controversies such as Pegasus, show that the State is increasingly capable not only of gathering data but also of analysing and predicting human behaviour. This paper examines whether the existing constitutional framework, centred on the right to privacy, is sufficient to address these developments. It argues that a privacy-based approach is limited, as it focuses on individual harm while overlooking broader concerns such as profiling, a lack of transparency and the misuse of aggregated data. This gap raises serious risks for individual autonomy and democratic accountability. Adopting a doctrinal and comparative methodology, the paper analyses Indian constitutional jurisprudence alongside global data-protection frameworks, particularly those of the European Union. It identifies the absence of clear safeguards against profiling in Indian law and highlights the need to move beyond privacy-centric thinking. The paper finds that current legal safeguards do not adequately address the risks posed by data-driven surveillance. It concludes by proposing greater transparency, stronger accountability mechanisms and clearer limits on profiling, so that technological advancement does not undermine constitutional values.

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) has profoundly affected the creative industries by enabling the rapid production of creative content such as text, images and music. These developments have also raised complex legal questions concerning copyright ownership, authorship, originality, infringement and the use of copyrighted material to train AI. This study examines the effectiveness of current copyright laws in addressing these problems through a mixed-method approach combining doctrinal and empirical analysis. The doctrinal analysis examines the Indian legal landscape alongside international treaties, comparative jurisprudence and key judicial decisions concerning AI-generated works. The empirical study, based on a survey of 150 creative professionals, examines how AI-related copyright challenges affect creative professionals' confidence in copyright protection. The results show that greater copyright challenges arising from generative AI have a negative effect on creators' trust in the current legal framework and indicate a need for greater clarity. The study calls for a dedicated framework of AI copyright rules, clearer rules for the authorship and ownership of AI-generated creative works, regulation of AI training datasets and international harmonisation of copyright law. By synthesising legal research and empirical data, the study contributes to the ongoing debate on copyright law and offers policy implications for striking an appropriate balance between technological innovation and the protection of creative professionals.

Sexual offences represent profound violations of human dignity, inflicting severe physical, psychological, and emotional trauma. Under the social contract, the state bears an absolute responsibility to protect the fundamental rights of every individual, and the persistence of sexual violence reflects systemic gaps in these protective mechanisms. Historically, criminal jurisprudence framed sexual offences through a cis-heteronormative binary, recognising women exclusively as victims and men exclusively as perpetrators. This rigid framework leaves marginalised groups, including adult men, transgender persons, and non-binary individuals, without adequate statutory protection. This paper offers a comparative legal analysis of the sexual offence frameworks of India and Australia. While Australia has largely shifted toward gender-neutral statutory language across its states and territories, India retains a gender-asymmetric model for adult victims under its criminal codes. The study traces the historical evolution of these laws, analyses the relevant constitutional mandates, and examines institutional resistance to reform, including concerns over false counter-claims and patriarchal assumptions. Drawing on statutory frameworks, judicial precedents, and human rights instruments, the paper argues for legislative reform in India to secure equal protection of the law for all victims of sexual violence, regardless of gender.

Artificial intelligence now underpins credit assessment across India's FinTech ecosystem, yet the legal frameworks governing it still conceive privacy as an individual right and financial risk as a balance-sheet phenomenon. This paper argues that AI-driven credit-scoring systems in India's digital lending markets convert privacy failures into systemic financial risk. Drawing on the technical architecture of behavioural scoring and the economics of alternative data, it shows how algorithmic inference, automated decision-making and standardised model infrastructure transform localised privacy harms into market-wide instability that consent-based data protection and consumer-focused financial regulation cannot contain. Examining the Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023 and the Reserve Bank of India's digital lending guidelines, it identifies the regulatory gaps through which such risk accumulates. The paper then reconceives privacy as a mechanism of credit-risk governance and sets out policy and technical recommendations, including integrated oversight, mandatory algorithmic impact assessments, algorithmic auditing and privacy-by-design, to align data protection with financial stability and constitutional values.

Indian criminal law has, for over a century and a half, wrestled with a single deceptively simple question: when does a killing amount to murder, and when does it remain the lesser offence of culpable homicide? The Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 (“BNS”) has replaced the Indian Penal Code, 1860 (“IPC”), and in doing so has renumbered, though not fundamentally reworked, this distinction. Section 100 of the BNS now defines culpable homicide, while Section 101 sets out the four situations in which culpable homicide is elevated to murder, subject to five statutory exceptions. This paper argues that the persistence of interpretative difficulty is not a drafting failure peculiar to the BNS but an inherent feature of any offence built on graduated mental states. Using a doctrinal method, the paper traces the historical development of the distinction from the IPC through the Law Commission's Forty-Second Report and the Malimath Committee, examines the statutory ingredients of Sections 100 and 101 of the BNS, and revisits the jurisprudence that continues to govern their application, most notably Govinda, Virsa Singh, and Rayavarapu Punnayya. It concludes that while the BNS offers linguistic continuity rather than conceptual reform, the underlying principle that every murder is culpable homicide, but not every culpable homicide is murder, remains indispensable to proportionate sentencing and the protection of individual liberty.

Food adulteration and food fraud have become serious threats to public health, consumer rights, and regulatory compliance. Increasingly, these acts are not merely breaches of regulation but crimes in their own right. Because food fraud has grown sophisticated, encompassing ingredient substitution, contamination, mislabelling, and the use of hazardous additives, the criminal justice system requires far stronger investigative methods. It is in this context that food forensics has assumed importance. It is a discipline that unites scientific and legal work to detect, examine, and prove food crimes. This article examines the role of food forensics in criminal justice, and in particular its value as evidence in prosecutions for food adulteration and fraud. It considers how techniques such as DNA analysis, chromatography, spectroscopy, and isotope profiling are used to detect adulterants and to confirm the identity and origin of food products. The study also considers how such scientific proof makes investigations stronger and more accurate and enables evidence to satisfy the courts' standards of admissibility. The legal framework governing food safety and criminal liability, with particular reference to India, is assessed alongside an examination of how the law is designed to operate and how it is enforced. The principal difficulties are identified: an absence of standardised procedures, questions about the reliability of the evidence, adherence to correct legal procedure, and a shortage of resources in forensic laboratories. The article argues that scientific advances must be aligned with legal reform in order to make the successful prosecution of, and accountability for, food crimes more attainable. It concludes that food forensics is essential to protecting public health and to maintaining confidence in the criminal justice system.

This paper critically examines the legal status and enforceability of smart contracts under Indian law, with particular reference to their implications for commercial certainty and remedial jurisprudence. Smart contracts are blockchain-based applications that generally run on self-executing code and are capable of enforcing contractual obligations once specified conditions are met. Their legal validity in India falls to be determined under the Indian Contract Act, 1872 and the Information Technology Act, 2000, notwithstanding their technological determinism and efficiency. The paper examines how the essential elements of a valid contract, offer, acceptance, lawful consideration, capacity, and free consent, may be satisfied in decentralised and pseudonymous blockchain environments. It also considers evidentiary recognition in digital law, the inter-jurisdictional issues that arise from borderless networks, and the tension between inflexible automated execution and fair judicial redress such as damages and restitution. Drawing on statutory law, judicial precedent, and academic literature, the paper argues that smart contracts are not inherently inconsistent with Indian contract law. Rather, interpretive adaptation and hybrid contractual frameworks that combine code with traditional legal drafting offer a pragmatic means of balancing technological innovation against doctrinal consistency and commercial predictability.

The rapid digitalization of global communication and governance has simultaneously enabled unprecedented technological growth and facilitated the expansion of cybercrime as a transnational threat. Cybercriminal activity now operates beyond traditional territorial boundaries, exploiting anonymity, encrypted networks and decentralized financial systems to challenge existing legal frameworks and investigative capacities. Despite early international efforts such as the Budapest Convention, inconsistencies in national cyber laws and asymmetries in enforcement capabilities continue to create safe havens for cyber offenders. The escalating scale of cyberattacks, from ransomware operations such as LockBit and global crackdowns such as Operation Endgame to sophisticated state-linked intrusions such as the SolarWinds breach, demonstrates the borderless nature of modern cyber threats. Developing digital economies, including India, face compounded vulnerabilities, as illustrated by large-scale frauds, digital arrest scams and cross-border laundering networks. These incidents reveal persistent gaps in jurisdictional clarity, mutual legal assistance, real-time data access and digital evidence management. This paper argues that addressing cybercrime as a transnational phenomenon requires harmonized legal standards, faster cross-border cooperation mechanisms and strengthened institutional capacities, particularly in the Global South. It examines global case studies, India's emerging cybercrime landscape and the challenges posed by data sovereignty and technological complexity. The study concludes that combating cybercrime demands a collective international response grounded in legal convergence, operational collaboration and trust-based global governance frameworks. Without such coordinated efforts, cybercriminal innovation will continue to outpace regulatory progress, undermining national security, economic stability and public trust in the digital ecosystem.

This article examines whether the Uniform Civil Code (UCC) envisaged by Article 44 of the Constitution of India is best understood as a constitutional mandate or as a political agenda. Article 44 directs the state to endeavour to secure a uniform civil code for all citizens, yet the provision sits within the non-justiciable Directive Principles of State Policy and has never been fully implemented. The article traces the origins of the UCC in the Constituent Assembly, analyses the judicial treatment of personal law in cases such as Mohd. Ahmed Khan v. Shah Bano Begum and Shayara Bano v. Union of India, and considers the competing claims of proponents and opponents. It situates the debate within wider questions of secularism, religious freedom under Article 25, gender justice, minority rights, and national integration, and it considers the political dimensions of the demand for a UCC in a pluralistic society. The article argues that the choice between uniformity and pluralism need not be absolute and concludes that a gradual, consultative, and gender-sensitive approach offers the most constitutionally coherent path forward.

This paper argues that the Mental Healthcare Act, 2017 marks one of the most significant rights-based shifts in Indian health law, yet its transformative promise remains only partially realised because the legal architecture of rights has advanced faster than the community systems required to make those rights meaningful. The Act moved Indian mental health law away from the older custodial and institution-centred framework of the Mental Health Act, 1987 and towards a statutory model grounded in dignity, autonomy, community living, legal aid, discharge planning, and state accountability. However, a serious implementation gap persists. Community-based rehabilitation, supported accommodation, functional review mechanisms, district-level coordination, and access-to-justice pathways remain uneven across states. This paper contends that social work, especially psychiatric social work, is the missing implementation link between legal entitlement and lived care. Existing legal and psychiatric scholarship has adequately identified the progressive content of the Act, and public health scholarship has highlighted treatment gaps and service deficits, but there remains insufficient interdisciplinary work on how social work can operationalise statutory rights through case management, supported decision-making, family and community reintegration, entitlement access, legal aid linkage, and multidisciplinary coordination. The paper therefore advances a law-and-social-work framework for the next phase of implementation. It concludes that the future of the Mental Healthcare Act lies not merely in defending its rights language, but in building a community-care state around it through institutionalised social work practice.

The principle of non-intervention, enshrined in the United Nations Charter and in customary international law, was designed to protect the sovereignty of each state and to prevent external interference in its internal affairs. Yet events in Somalia, Rwanda, Srebrenica, Kosovo, Libya, Syria, Myanmar, and Tigray reveal a persistent gap between what the law prescribes and the imperative of protecting civilians from atrocity. The Responsibility to Protect (R2P) was conceived to ensure that states safeguard their populations, but its uneven application has undermined its credibility. Where the United Nations has authorised intervention, as in Libya, the mandate has at times been exceeded; conversely, action taken without prior authorisation, as in Kosovo, raises serious questions of legality and legitimacy. In Rwanda, Myanmar, and Tigray, by contrast, political considerations obstructed any meaningful response. This paper asks how international law can respect the independence of each state while still protecting civilians from genocide and other atrocities, and it argues that sovereignty is increasingly conditional upon a state’s discharge of its responsibility to protect its own people.

Reliable electricity is fundamental to creating safe, inclusive, and effective learning environments, particularly in geographically remote tribal regions where educational institutions often face infrastructure constraints. This study examines the impact of solar energy initiatives implemented by the Himachal Pradesh Energy Development Agency (HIMURJA) on the quality of education in beneficiary educational institutions in Kinnaur district, Himachal Pradesh. Employing a qualitative research design, the study draws on primary data collected through semi-structured interviews with representatives of schools, colleges, and Industrial Training Institutes (ITIs). The findings indicate that solar energy initiatives have strengthened educational infrastructure by ensuring a reliable electricity supply, supporting digital teaching and learning processes, improving institutional functioning, enhancing campus safety, and facilitating vocational and technical education. However, challenges such as limited technical awareness, inadequate battery storage capacity, irregular maintenance support, and insufficient financial provisions for post-warranty maintenance continue to affect the long-term sustainability of these interventions. The study concludes that solar energy initiatives contribute not only to clean energy access but also to strengthening the physical and functional foundations of quality education in tribal areas. It recommends expanding solar energy coverage alongside robust technical and financial support mechanisms to enhance the sustainability and effectiveness of such initiatives and advance the achievement of SDG 4 (Quality Education).

The proliferation of online retail has outpaced the legal and institutional architecture designed to govern it, exposing consumers to risks that are increasingly cross-border, data-intensive, and platform-mediated in nature. This paper undertakes a detailed review of the literature on India's consumer protection framework for e-commerce, principally the Consumer Protection Act, 2019 and the Consumer Protection (E-Commerce) Rules, 2020, to identify emerging issues in cross-border trade, data protection, and digital governance. Drawing on four recent doctrinal and empirical studies, the review traces the statutory evolution from the Consumer Protection Act, 1986 to the 2019 Act, examines the specific provisions governing product liability, marketplace and inventory e-commerce entities, grievance redressal, and penal consequences, and evaluates the operational record of the Central Consumer Protection Authority (CCPA). The review finds that although India has constructed a comparatively comprehensive statutory and institutional apparatus, three structural gaps persist: jurisdictional reach has outpaced enforceability in cross-border disputes; data protection is addressed only derivatively, as a species of unfair trade practice, rather than as a freestanding regulatory domain; and digital governance institutions face unresolved ambiguity in allocating liability across multi-seller marketplace platforms. The paper concludes with a set of recommendations addressing enforcement infrastructure, data-protection integration, marketplace liability clarity, and consumer education.

To convict someone of a crime, the law usually needs two things: a wrongful act (actus reus) and a guilty mind (mens rea). The General Exceptions chapter of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 (BNS) builds on an old legal idea, expressed in two Latin phrases: ignorantia facti excusat and ignorantia juris non excusat. In plain terms, a mistake about the facts can excuse a person, but a mistake about the law cannot. If someone honestly and reasonably gets the facts wrong, they may lack the guilty mind the law requires, so the act may not be a crime at all. But if someone simply did not know a law existed, that is not accepted as an excuse, because the law assumes every person knows the law once it has been properly published. This paper looks at Sections 14 and 17 of the BNS, which carry forward Sections 76 and 79 of the Indian Penal Code, 1860 (IPC), and traces how courts have applied this distinction, from the old English case of Queen v. Tolson to the Supreme Court's 2025 decision in Sakshi Arha v. Rajasthan High Court. It argues that although the rule is clear in theory, it still raises real questions of fairness, especially as laws multiply and not everyone has equal access to legal information.

The security and dignity of an individual in the place of work, whether it be an educational institution or a factory, and whether within a concrete building or in the online realm, are pre-eminent for fostering an environment conducive to efficiency and the acquisition of knowledge. In India, the fight against sexual harassment has been long evolving and has seen significant developments, culminating in the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, 2013 (the POSH Act), which has been supplemented by the UGC Regulations of 2015. Yet, because of the rapid advancement of technology, the law has struggled to keep pace, leaving grey areas that are yet to be addressed. This article examines the legal framework established by the POSH Act, the UGC Regulations and key judicial pronouncements, and the need for reform in light of the growing role of technology and the work-from-home culture that emerged significantly after the Covid-19 pandemic, with a view to eliminating sexual harassment from workspaces, including virtual platforms.

Digital platform work has become a visible part of the Sri Lankan labour market through ride-hailing, food delivery, e-commerce logistics, remote freelancing, online professional services and data-related micro-work. The growth of this form of work challenges the employee-employer framework on which Sri Lankan labour legislation is largely built. Platform workers frequently enjoy some formal flexibility, but that flexibility is often accompanied by algorithmic supervision, unilateral contractual terms, income volatility, occupational risk, absence of social security and weak access to collective voice. This paper adopts a doctrinal method to examine whether Sri Lanka should adopt the ILO Decent Work in the Platform Economy Convention, 2026 (Convention No. 193), why such adoption is necessary, how compatible Sri Lanka’s existing law is with the Convention, and what legal reforms are required. The paper argues that Sri Lanka’s existing labour law contains useful protective principles, particularly through concepts such as “workman”, minimum wage regulation, labour tribunal remedies, occupational safety, maternity protection, social security funds and trade union rights. However, these protections remain structurally dependent on proof of an employment relationship or statutory coverage, and therefore do not adequately reach gig workers who are described as self-employed, freelancers or independent contractors. The paper concludes that Sri Lanka should ratify and implement Convention No. 193 through a dedicated Platform Work Act, supported by amendments to labour, social security, trade union, data protection and dispute resolution frameworks. The central reform objective should not be to remove flexibility, but to prevent flexibility from becoming a legal device for transferring risk and avoiding responsibility.

Rape, under Indian law, means sex without consent. But there is one significant exception. If the man is the woman's husband, and she is over eighteen, the law says it is not rape at all. This rule is called Exception 2 to Section 63 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 ("BNS"), and it is almost a word-for-word copy of the old Exception 2 to Section 375 of the Indian Penal Code, 1860 ("IPC"). This paper asks a simple question: why did this rule survive a law that was meant to remove old colonial thinking from Indian criminal law? It looks at where the rule came from, how the Justice Verma Committee asked for it to be scrapped in 2013, and why Parliament kept it anyway. It then walks through the important court decisions on the subject: Independent Thought v Union of India, Nimeshbhai Bharatbhai Desai v State of Gujarat, the Karnataka High Court's "rape is rape" ruling in Hrishikesh Sahoo v State of Karnataka, the split verdict of the Delhi High Court in RIT Foundation v Union of India, and the Kerala High Court's ruling that marital rape is a valid ground for divorce. It ends with the petitions now pending before the Supreme Court, which has heard arguments but not yet delivered a final verdict as of 2026. The paper's conclusion is straightforward: the exception has survived mostly because lawmakers have been unwilling to touch it, not because anyone has offered a strong reason for keeping it.

Rule 33 of the CGST Rules, 2017 excludes from the value of supply those costs that a supplier incurs as a ‘pure agent’ of the recipient, subject to three conjunctive conditions and a defined set of elements. This paper tests how that framework applies to e-commerce platforms, whose operations increasingly extend from mere transaction facilitation to full fulfilment. After setting out the statutory scheme and surveying advance rulings that have interpreted pure agency in varied contexts, the paper examines two recent CBIC circulars, on electricity-charge reimbursements and on TCS liability among multiple e-commerce operators, and dissects the marketplace and fulfilment models against the Rule 33 criteria of authorisation, no title to goods, no personal use, and actual cost recovery. It concludes that a strict marketplace intermediary may qualify as a pure agent, while platforms controlling inventory or charging marked-up fulfilment fees generally fall outside the concept, and it argues for clearer regulatory guidance to reduce compliance uncertainty and litigation.

Literature and law might seem to be different streams in society, but the epistemology of literature can never be isolated from that of law and vice versa. Literature expresses the aspiration and spirit of society, and a judgment is nothing but the voice of social righteousness documented as per legal normativity. The application of literature in legal judgments and the application of legal knowledge in literary fictions are not unheard of. The dialectics of the intertwined double helix of law and literature have always gained the attention of both the legal world and the world of literature. Numerous literary quotes in various landmark judgments are documented proof of literature's power to convey the essence of a jury's decision, giving life to the soul of a judgment. Legal-judgment-based literary creations have been bestsellers in every generation. It would not be incorrect to say that the fabric of literary engagements in law has been knitted with the threads of 'law in literature', 'literature in law', and 'law as literature'. This article is based upon a doctrinal study in an effort to understand the interrelation of law and literature through various case laws and to capture the tapestry of natural justice woven by both law and literature through constitutional principles and debates.

This research highlights opportunities for knowledge exchange, capacity building and inclusive development in and within the Global South by identifying some of the key areas where potential measures could be taken to develop collaborations for capacity building on the basis of the success of the unique experiences, strategies and practices that some of the countries in the Global South have to offer in terms of capacity building for India, as well as the lessons to be learned from India's successful experiences by other countries in the Global South. Such collaborations and capacity building can go a long way towards strengthening the nation's efforts to achieve important milestones and to foster a roadmap to accelerate the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals.

The proliferation of digital technologies has transformed the nature, scale, and reach of violence against women, giving rise to a distinct category of harm now widely described as "digital violence" or "technology-facilitated gender-based violence." This manuscript examines the adequacy of India's legal architecture, spanning the Information Technology Act, 2000, the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023, the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, and the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021, together with its 2025 and 2026 amendments, in confronting this emerging challenge. It traces the evolution of judicial responses, from foundational rulings on cyber-obscenity and intermediary liability to the recent surge of personality-rights litigation confronting deepfakes and synthetic non-consensual intimate imagery. Situating the doctrinal analysis within National Crime Records Bureau data and international human rights instruments including CEDAW General Recommendation No. 35, the manuscript argues that India's response remains fragmented, reactive, and structurally ill-suited to harms that are borderless, technologically mutable, and disproportionately gendered. Drawing comparative lessons from the United States' TAKE IT DOWN Act, 2025, the United Kingdom's Online Safety Act, 2023, and the European Union's Digital Services Act, it proposes a dedicated statutory framework grounded in consent rather than authenticity, victim-centric takedown mechanisms, gender-neutral drafting, and cross-border cooperation, while cautioning against regulatory overreach that could compromise legitimate expression. It concludes that meaningful protection against digital violence requires a coherent, rights-based legislative response calibrated to an artificial-intelligence-mediated information ecosystem, rather than incremental amendment of instruments never designed for this purpose.

In India, cases relating to crimes against women pose particular evidentiary difficulties, so forensic evidence plays a key role in proving culpability where eyewitness testimony is absent. This paper examines advanced forensic technologies, legal admissibility and the practical issues relating to forensic evidence in cases of crimes against women, such as sexual assault, domestic violence and other related offences. It considers the legislation that regulates forensic evidence, the judicial principles of admissibility, and the way in which scientific evidence is being reinterpreted by the courts. Specific focus is placed on improper collection, contamination, delayed forensic examination, lack of a chain of custody, and the fluctuating quality of forensic infrastructure, all of which often compromise the probative value of evidence. Gender-specific issues are also examined, including the re-traumatisation of victims in medico-legal processes, the underreporting of crime, and the societal biases that influence both the investigation and the outcome of the trial. Through a critical analysis of judicial pronouncements and conditions on the ground, the paper highlights the disconnect between the theoretical soundness of forensic science and its actual use in sex-based crimes. It argues that strengthening forensic procedures, making them victim-sensitive, and increasing judicial literacy in forensic science can improve evidentiary reliability and contribute to substantive justice.

Indian company law no longer speaks only in the idiom of shareholder wealth. Section 166(2) of the Companies Act, 2013 directs directors to promote the objects of the company for the benefit of the members as a whole while also acting in the best interests of the company, its employees, the shareholders, the community and the environment. Section 135, Schedule VII, the CSR Rules and listed-company sustainability disclosures further show that corporate purpose in India has become a legal question about the allocation of voice, risk and accountability. Yet the practical architecture remains incomplete. This paper argues that India should treat stakeholder governance not as a moral supplement to profit but as an enforceable accountability model. Drawing only on the supplied scholarship and legislation, it shows that the Indian framework contains three linked gaps: an indeterminate best-interests standard, weak participatory rights for non-shareholder constituencies and disclosure duties that often describe social responsibility without making affected communities capable governance participants. The paper proposes a calibrated framework built on board-level reasons, stakeholder consultation in material decisions, stronger CSR accountability and public-interest review where corporate power affects constitutional and social values.

The progressive integration of artificial intelligence into clinical decision-making processes has generated a legal lacuna of considerable consequence, one that existing medical liability frameworks, designed for human actors operating within conventional physician-patient relationships, are structurally ill-equipped to address. This research paper examines the doctrinal inadequacies of current medical negligence law when applied to AI-assisted clinical decisions, analyses the liability attribution challenges arising from the triadic relationship between physician, patient, and algorithmic system, and evaluates comparative regulatory responses across the United States, European Union, Australia, and India. Drawing upon landmark judicial decisions, legislative frameworks, and academic literature, the paper argues that the resolution of medical liability in AI-assisted clinical decision-making requires not the incremental adaptation of existing tort principles but the deliberate construction of a new, purpose-built legal framework, one that assigns responsibility equitably, incentivises safety, preserves patient rights, and remains responsive to the pace of technological evolution.

Property ownership is fundamental to economic security and social stability. However, the Indian property registration system continues to operate under a presumptive title regime, whereby registration evidences a transaction but does not guarantee ownership. Consequently, purchasers bear the responsibility of verifying title, often resulting in title disputes, fraudulent transfers, and prolonged litigation. In Tamil Nadu, Rule 55-A of the Registration Rules sought to strengthen documentary verification by requiring the production of original title documents at the time of registration. However, in K. Gopi v. Sub-Registrar, the Supreme Court reaffirmed that registering authorities lack adjudicatory powers to determine title and cannot refuse registration on that basis, thereby limiting the operation of Rule 55-A. In response, the Registration (Tamil Nadu Amendment) Act, 2025 introduced Section 34-C into the Registration Act, 1908, mandating the production of parent title deeds, encumbrance certificates, and other supporting documents before registration. The amendment seeks to strengthen documentary scrutiny while remaining consistent with the statutory framework governing registration. This paper critically examines the legal and practical implications of Section 34-C, its role in preventing fraudulent property transactions, and its interaction with the principles governing property registration. It further evaluates the opportunities and challenges presented by digital registration and e-conveyancing, particularly with respect to transparency, data protection, and procedural fairness. The study concludes that although Section 34-C enhances transactional security through improved verification, comprehensive legal reforms, technological integration, and institutional coordination remain essential for developing a transparent, reliable, and secure property registration system while preserving the constitutional protection of property rights.

In recent years, dangerous stunt riding has become a growing concern on the roads of Karnataka, particularly in Bengaluru and other urban areas. Young riders often perform risky acts such as wheelies, stoppies, street racing, and riding without proper control, frequently influenced by videos shared on social media platforms. While these stunts may appear exciting or entertaining, they pose a serious threat to the safety of riders, pedestrians, passengers, and other road users, and the increasing number of accidents and injuries linked to such activities highlights the urgent need for stronger preventive measures. Although existing laws such as the Motor Vehicles Act, 1988 and the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 provide penalties for rash and negligent driving, they do not specifically address stunt riding as a separate offence, which creates challenges for law enforcement agencies in effectively dealing with the problem. This paper examines the rise of stunt riding in Karnataka, its impact on public safety, the role of social media in encouraging such behaviour, and the shortcomings of the current legal framework. It also studies international approaches adopted in countries such as Australia and Canada to address similar issues. The study concludes that a dedicated law is necessary to promote responsible road use, strengthen road safety, and protect human life; by addressing both the physical and digital aspects of stunt riding, the proposed legislation has the potential to create safer roads and serve as a model for other states in India.

This article examines the marital rape exception in Indian criminal law and argues that its persistence reflects structural inequality rather than mere doctrinal oversight. Situating the exception within the lived socio-economic realities of poor women, it contends that the presumption of irrevocable marital consent operates as a mechanism of exclusion that is most burdensome for those least able to resist it. Drawing on the framework of legal empowerment of the poor, and using international humanitarian and human rights norms on sexual violence as a comparative benchmark, the article analyses the statutory framework under the former Section 375 Exception 2 of the Indian Penal Code and Section 63 Exception 2 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023, related provisions under the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005 and the Medical Termination of Pregnancy laws, and the evolving judicial discourse, including Independent Thought v. Union of India, the split verdict in RIT Foundation v. Union of India, and X v. Principal Secretary, Health and Family Welfare Department. It concludes that criminalisation alone is insufficient and that meaningful reform requires complementary structural interventions, including accessible legal aid, income and housing support, decentralised healthcare and community-based legal awareness, so that the constitutional promises of dignity, equality and bodily autonomy become realisable for poor women.

The rapid development of digital technologies and online platforms has created many opportunities for minors in learning, communication, and comprehensive development, while also increasing the risks of infringement upon their rights and lawful interests. In this context, civil procedure plays an important judicial role in ensuring the protection of minors' rights when disputes or acts of infringement arise in the digital environment. However, the rapid development of digital technologies has posed many new challenges to Vietnamese civil procedural law, while the current provisions are mainly built on the basis of traditional civil relations and have not kept pace with the specific characteristics of the digital environment. On the basis of analytical, synthetic, and comparative legal methods and research into the provisions of Vietnamese law in relation to international standards on human rights and children's rights, this article analyses the legal challenges in protecting minors' rights through civil procedure. The research results show that current law still contains gaps regarding minors' right to initiate lawsuits against acts of infringement in the digital environment, the representation mechanism where the legal representative has a conflict of interest with the minor, as well as the application of the principle that the Court may not refuse to resolve a civil case on the ground that there is no legal provision to apply to disputes arising from digital technology. On that basis, the article proposes solutions to improve civil procedural law in order to enhance the effectiveness of protecting minors' rights in the digital environment, thereby contributing to the implementation of international standards on children's rights and improving judicial protection in Vietnam.

Artificial intelligence is increasingly becoming a governing medium through which institutions classify persons, allocate opportunities, structure work, produce knowledge and mediate public trust. Current AI governance frameworks emphasise risk classification, technical assurance, transparency, accountability and human oversight. These instruments are necessary, but they remain incomplete when algorithmic decisions reshape the meaning of agency, dignity, responsibility and social recognition. This paper develops a humanities-based framework for algorithmic governance suitable for law, management and public life. Using an interdisciplinary conceptual methodology, it synthesises legal-policy frameworks, AI ethics scholarship, management studies and contemporary philosophical work on ontological instability, AI stakeholder recognition and moral responsibility. The paper argues that algorithmic governance should not be assessed only by whether systems are accurate, explainable or compliant, but also by whether affected persons retain interpretive agency, contestatory power, relational recognition and meaningful participation in institutional life. It proposes the Human Agency Impact Matrix, a six-dimensional framework that evaluates algorithmic systems through interpretability, contestability, relational accountability, dignity preservation, participatory design and institutional reversibility. The analysis shows that risk-based regulation is strongest when complemented by humanistic assessment of how AI changes roles, identities, vulnerabilities and obligations. The paper concludes that responsible AI governance must be understood as a cultural and institutional practice: a way of preserving human agency within socio-technical systems that increasingly act before, beside and sometimes instead of human judgment.

Parole is a central instrument of the modern criminal justice system, offering the conditional release of a prisoner before the completion of the sentence as a means of rehabilitation, reintegration, and relief from prison overcrowding. This paper examines the nature of the right to parole in India, tracing its evolution from restorative practices in ancient India, through its introduction during the colonial era, to the present statutory and administrative framework under the Criminal Procedure Code, the Prisons Act, 1894, and various state guidelines and furlough rules. It analyses the attitude of the Supreme Court and the High Courts, which have treated parole not as an absolute right but as a discretionary measure subject to reasonable restrictions, while insisting that parole decisions be fair, reasoned, and non-arbitrary. The paper further highlights instances of misuse of parole, including political interference, preferential treatment, and failure to enforce conditions, and concludes with suggestions for strengthening the transparency, independence, and accountability of the parole system so that it balances the rehabilitation of prisoners against the interests of public safety.

As live-in relationships become more visible in India, the legal debate is no longer limited to whether such relationships are lawful, but also extends to the rights, responsibilities and vulnerabilities that may arise from them. Although constitutional principles protect the freedom of consenting adults to live together and certain statutory remedies are available in qualifying cases, India still lacks a clear and comprehensive framework governing the legal consequences of long-term cohabitation. As a result, the law provides greater clarity on the freedom to choose such a relationship than on the responsibilities that may arise from a shared domestic life. This paper examines the evolution of live-in relationships in India, the existing legal framework and the judicial principles that have shaped their recognition. It also studies relevant international standards and selected legal models from Australia, New Zealand and Ireland, which provide different approaches to recognising cohabiting relationships, property rights, economic disadvantage and financial dependency. The study finds that the main weakness of the Indian legal position is not a complete absence of protection, but a framework that remains fragmented, uncertain and dependent on the particular remedy being claimed. The paper proposes a comprehensive but balanced legal framework based on different levels of rights and responsibilities. It recommends flexible legal recognition, financial remedies based on contribution and economic disadvantage, child-centred protection, limited relief for surviving dependent partners, legally protected cohabitation agreements and a balanced system of registration. The proposed framework aims to maintain the legal distinction between marriage and cohabitation while ensuring that genuine dependency, contribution and responsibility receive proper legal recognition even when the relationship exists outside marriage.

Constitutionalism represents a foundational principle of governance that seeks to limit arbitrary power and safeguard individual liberty through the rule of law, separation of powers, and protection of fundamental rights. This paper critically examines the evolution and conceptual foundations of constitutionalism, distinguishing it from the mere existence of a written constitution. It argues that constitutionalism is substantive in nature and may exist even in systems lacking a codified constitution, as exemplified by the British model. The study undertakes a comparative analysis of constitutionalism in the United Kingdom, the United States, and India, highlighting their distinct institutional approaches while underscoring their shared commitment to limiting power and preserving rights. Further, the paper explores the essential features of constitutionalism, including constitutionalisation, rule of law, separation of powers, independence of the judiciary, judicial review, and fundamental rights, with particular emphasis on the Indian constitutional framework and the doctrine of basic structure. Moving beyond classical theory, the paper engages with contemporary challenges such as digital governance, algorithmic decision-making, surveillance, and the shifting nature of power beyond the State. It argues that constitutionalism must evolve to address these emerging realities while retaining its normative core. The paper concludes that constitutionalism remains a living and adaptive doctrine, essential for maintaining the balance between power and liberty in an increasingly complex and technologically driven world.

Preventive policing under the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023 (BNSS) empowers the police to intervene before a cognizable offence is committed in order to maintain public order. This paper examines the preventive powers conferred by Chapter XII of the BNSS, read with the substantive framework of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 (BNS), and argues that these powers, though necessary, are frequently misused by officers responding to informal case targets and institutional pressure. Using a combined doctrinal and empirical method, it analyses the relevant statutory provisions, the constitutional safeguards under Articles 14, 21 and 22, and the leading judicial responses in Maneka Gandhi, Joginder Kumar, D.K. Basu and Arnesh Kumar. It identifies recurring patterns of misuse, including arbitrary preventive detention, repeated harassment and the disproportionate targeting of marginalised groups, and it surveys comparative safeguards from the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia and Germany. The paper concludes with reforms directed at stronger oversight, transparent record-keeping, revised performance metrics and a rebalanced structure of police accountability.

The Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005 (PWDVA) stands as one of the more progressive legislative achievements of post-liberalisation India, yet its gender-specific architecture renders a wide range of intimate-partner and familial abuse legally invisible. LGBTQIA+ individuals who experience domestic violence inhabit a peculiar juridical void: their relationships are neither recognised by family law nor consistently protected by criminal law, and until recently their very identity was criminalised. The partial constitutional reclamation accomplished by Navtej Singh Johar decriminalised same-sex intimacy but did not confer relational rights or civil protection. This article argues that the exclusion of LGBTQIA+ victims from the PWDVA framework constitutes a compounded violation of Articles 14, 15, 19, and 21 of the Constitution of India: the rights to equality, non-discrimination, dignity, and life. Drawing on constitutional jurisprudence and comparative legislative models from South Africa, the United Kingdom, and Nepal, and through a close reading of the statutory text, this article proposes concrete legislative and judicial interventions: a gender-neutral amendment to the PWDVA, recognition of same-sex domestic relationships, and the development of a judicial interpretive canon that treats the PWDVA as a living instrument. It concludes that the invisibility of LGBTQIA+ victims is not accidental but is the product of heteronormative assumptions embedded in the existing legal structure that the courts and Parliament must now consciously dismantle.

Background: Road traffic injuries (RTIs) are becoming a serious and growing public health problem in India. In Delhi, the Motor Vehicles (Amendment) Act, 2019 introduced important legal changes to improve road safety; however, these changes can only make a real difference if people are aware of them and understand how to follow them in daily life. Objectives: To assess health literacy regarding RTIs, evaluate public perception of contributory risk factors, and analyse awareness and perceived effectiveness of road safety policy among road users in Delhi. Design/methodology/approach: A cross-sectional survey collected primary data from 100 road users across all five administrative zones of Delhi using a structured, self-administered questionnaire of 25 questions spanning six key themes. Findings: Most respondents (64%) felt they had a moderate understanding of traffic laws, but only 41% could correctly identify specific provisions of the Motor Vehicles Act. About 70% were familiar with the concept of the Golden Hour. Speeding was seen as the main cause of RTIs by 43% of participants, and more than half (57%) recognised RTIs as a public health emergency; however, on behaviour change after enforcement of the Act, 44% reported only partial improvement. While general health awareness was moderate to high, the psychological impact of RTIs remained largely overlooked. Originality/value: A clear gap persists between knowing the rules and actually following them. To bridge it, the study suggests a practical, multi-pronged approach: automated enforcement, community-based awareness campaigns, safer road-system design, and targeted outreach to marginalised groups, which together can help turn the intent of the Motor Vehicles (Amendment) Act, 2019 into real change on the ground.

In Vietnamese civil law and marriage and family law, the accurate determination of the legal status of adopted children and stepchildren directly affects the scope of inheritance rights and the scope of subjects identified as family members. However, current judicial practice is facing a key question: does the objective element of long-term actual care and nurturing automatically equate to the establishment of an adoptive parent-child relationship, or is it merely one of the manifestations of the voluntary intent to establish such a relationship? This article approaches the issue through an analysis of Judgment No. 108/2020/DS-PT of the High People’s Court in Da Nang. This case represents a typical situation in which the relationship between a stepmother and her husband’s stepchild is casually “formalised” into an adoptive parent-child relationship in order to legitimise the outcome of estate division. The author asserts that the court’s ruling contains a serious error, and the article demonstrates that this mistake has systemic consequences for the legitimate interests of third parties.

Cybercrime has emerged as one of the most significant challenges in the era of rapid digitalisation. It is the duty of the authorities and of responsible citizens to meet this challenge with a strong legal framework. The rise in cybercrime is alarming because, unlike traditional crime, it is not easy to identify and punish offenders. The battlefield is highly technology-oriented, and those who master the technology hold power over this space. The digital divide that persists in society leaves many people helpless in confronting such crime, which makes a robust legal framework essential. In Indian conditions there is a very large population of internet users, but the majority of them lack a deep understanding of how technology operates, and this divide should make the government more thoughtful about securing them. The Information Technology Act, 2000, is the primary cyber-law of India, and it penalises cyber offences according to their gravity. The investigation of cybercrime is challenging, and the question of jurisdiction is one such difficulty, because these crimes take place on the internet and the offender may belong to any nation, so enforcement officers cannot exercise full authority without proper international cooperation. This article explores the multi-faceted nature of India's cybercrime framework and examines the strengths and weaknesses of the existing regime, arguing that this framework must be further secured.

The recognition of education as an inherent right within the constitutional framework of India has improved children's access to schooling from the point of view of values such as equality, dignity, and social justice. Despite this, the discussion around education in the Constitution still dwells mainly on access, enrolment, and completion, and lacks sufficient focus on whether children are provided opportunities to study according to their abilities, interests, and talents and to reach their dreams and goals. This study investigates the constitutional basis and policies around the concept of educational choice, considering the realities of fixed curricula, a test-oriented education system, coaching culture, job-oriented pedagogy, and swift changes in the competence needs of the modern economy. It assesses how these realities influence the ability to innovate and create, the employability of young people, and their overall impact on child development, including the emergence of challenges in the economy and education. By applying constitutional provisions, landmark court cases, the national education policies, and literature-review methods, the study assesses the extent to which the current education framework is integrated with the constitutional vision of holistic education. In the end, it argues that the idea of education should be based not only on providing different types of access but also on ensuring flexibility, critical thinking, and the successful launching of children into the world.

Acid violence in India reveals the inadequacies of a system that permits injuries while acknowledging the need to make good only where injuries can be fatal. This Article addresses the gap between the law's acknowledgment of acid attack survivors and the practice of victim justice, which has not yet been achieved. It undertakes a doctrinal legal study of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 and the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023, the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016, prominent judgments of the Supreme Court, and the latest official data on acid attack cases and the backlog of cases. The Article reveals how Indian law, in the case of acid violence, has moved away from the law and justice of ordinary hurts: it has identified the offence, guaranteed a minimum level of compensation, provided a comprehensive scheme for medical and rehabilitation services, and declared an essential connection to disability. This change in the law and policy of acid violence has been balanced and transformative in some respects. Judicial activism has, in some instances, resolved some of these issues, but survivors still do not have complete rights. The Article concludes that justice for victims of acid violence is a right to compensation, reconstruction, rehabilitative care, and an integrated justice system.

Cross-border cybercrime highlights the tension that exists between territorial criminal process and globally dispersed digital evidence. India's Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 (BNS) enlarges the scope of conduct outside India that is considered actionable, including offences committed against computer resources situated in India. However, jurisdiction to legislate is not equivalent to the ability to investigate a crime and collect admissible digital evidence in another jurisdiction. This article discusses the interplay between the BNS, the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023 (BNSS), the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, 2023 (BSA) and the Information Technology Act, 2000 (IT Act). India's want of capacity in its criminal process to deal with cybercrime lies in procedure and institutions rather than in substance alone: the BNSS provides the basis for letters of request and reciprocal assistance, whereas the BSA strengthens the requirements of certification and integrity. Neither framework, however, caters for the speed at which cloud deletion, encryption and multi-jurisdictional platforms operate. This article recommends a dual, rights-based process of cooperation, that is, preservation and 24/7 coordination ahead of a fast and standardised system of mutual legal assistance.

The legal status of unpaid domestic labour has undergone a significant transformation in Indian jurisprudence over the past two decades. While traditionally regarded as an extension of familial obligation rather than productive labour, recent judicial decisions have increasingly recognised the economic value of homemaking, particularly within the framework of compensation law. The Supreme Court's decision in Shishu Pal @ Shish Ram v. Surjeet (2026), which quantified the monthly value of a deceased homemaker's labour at ₹30,000 and described homemakers as "Nation Builders," represents the most recent and perhaps the most ambitious articulation of this judicial trend. Yet this recognition raises a deeper jurisprudential question: does compensation awarded after death amount to genuine legal recognition of unpaid domestic labour, or does it merely create a limited exception within a legal system that otherwise continues to treat such labour as economically invisible? This article examines the constitutional and doctrinal evolution of judicial approaches towards unpaid domestic labour under Indian compensation law and contrasts them with the treatment of homemakers within family law. It argues that although compensation jurisprudence has progressively acknowledged the economic significance of domestic work through doctrines such as notional income, future prospects and loss of domestic care, these developments remain episodic because they arise only after death or serious injury. By comparison, family law continues to deny homemakers any automatic proprietary interest in marital assets despite recognising their contribution to the household. The article further situates Indian jurisprudence alongside English matrimonial property law and selected American community-property regimes to evaluate alternative legal models capable of recognising unpaid domestic labour during the homemaker's lifetime. It concludes that meaningful legal recognition requires movement beyond posthumous compensation towards a coherent framework in which unpaid domestic labour generates enforceable economic rights within marriage itself.

The paper analyses the legal paradox created by WTO trade liberalisation policies that encourage the establishment of Export Processing Zones (EPZs) while also compromising fundamental labour standards in developing countries' textile manufacturing industries. By examining WTO agreements, ILO conventions and case studies from Bangladesh, Honduras and India, this study shows how institutional flaws and regulatory arbitrage allow for the systematic circumvention of basic worker protections. According to the study, EPZs, especially those involved in the garment and textile sectors, function under labour laws that have been modified to limit freedom of association, allow for excessive working hours and provide insufficient protection for workforces that are predominantly female. Enforcement gaps continue despite global efforts such as corporate social responsibility frameworks and ILO programmes. The paper concludes that, in order to stop this race to the bottom in protections for workers, significant changes are needed, which necessitates concerted action that links trade agreements to enforceable labour standards and strengthens domestic regulatory capacity by establishing binding international compliance mechanisms.

Domestic violence in India has long been considered a private or family matter. Still, its impact has a much broader dimension in terms of the social, political, and legal structure of the country. This paper examines domestic violence not simply as a gendered issue but as a structural problem related to questions of representation, equity, and governance. Adopting an integrated doctrinal and socio-legal research methodology, the study assesses the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005 (PWDVA) and identifies the social, economic, and cultural context in which it operates. Special focus is placed on marriage, marital expectations, and patriarchal expectations, which undermine women's autonomy within the family. The paper connects women's vulnerability to violence and their access to justice with socio-economic dependency, rural-urban hierarchies, and cultural norms. Using a combination of demographic and political representation data, the paper also interrogates the ways in which the underrepresentation of women and marginalised groups in legislative and decision-making institutions undermines the implementation of protective laws. The conclusions suggest that the efficacy of legislation to prevent domestic violence cannot be discussed at a grand theoretical level, but should be expressed in the language of structural inequality and political will. The paper concludes by suggesting remedial legal reforms, policy interventions, and an enhanced presence of women in governance institutions as solutions not just for a more equitable society but for a more responsive and caring one.

In this article the author undertakes a cross-jurisdictional and historical study of the origins of gig workers, looking at India, the USA, the UK, Europe and China in order to understand the gig economy better. The article analyses the legal, social and technological contexts in which gig work has emerged, with the aim of identifying what caused gig work to become so popular and how it affects workers, employers and society at large. In doing so, it seeks to contribute to the ongoing discussions and debates about the gig economy, to assist in the making of better policy, and to give a clearer historical picture of how work has changed in a globalised and digital world. Overall, the article aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of the multifaceted nature of the gig economy by examining the factors that have contributed to its rapid growth and the implications of that growth for workers, employers and society.

This study examines how employee motivation influences job satisfaction among professionals in the information technology (IT) industry, and whether employee engagement mediates and organisational commitment moderates that relationship. Motivation is disaggregated into intrinsic and extrinsic dimensions, consistent with Self-Determination Theory and Herzberg's Two-Factor Theory. A quantitative, cross-sectional survey design was used. Primary data were obtained from 300 IT employees through a structured questionnaire comprising 27 items measured on a five-point Likert scale, covering intrinsic motivation, extrinsic motivation, employee engagement, organisational commitment, and job satisfaction. Data were screened for completeness, invalid values, and duplication, and all constructs demonstrated strong internal consistency (Cronbach's alpha ranging from .83 to .96). Analyses included descriptive statistics, Pearson correlation, multiple regression, bootstrapped mediation, and moderated regression. All constructs were strongly and positively intercorrelated. Multiple regression showed that intrinsic (β = .50) and extrinsic (β = .48) motivation jointly explained 88.8% of the variance in job satisfaction, with both predictors significant (p < .001). Employee engagement partially mediated the motivation–satisfaction relationship, the bootstrapped indirect effect being significant (indirect = .29, 95% CI [.22, .37]). However, organisational commitment did not significantly moderate the relationship (interaction p = .82). The findings confirm motivation as a dominant driver of IT employee satisfaction, operating partly through engagement, and offer HR managers evidence-based levers for retention. Limitations relating to the cross-sectional, single-source design and high construct intercorrelation are discussed.

Justice delayed is justice denied. Plea bargaining is the process of an accused saying, "I plead guilty and save your time, so I deserve a lighter punishment". Plea bargaining helps the court and the state to convict better. Plea bargaining as a concept existed earlier as well, but it was first recognised in the United States through law, and later other countries applied it too, having seen the success of the process. The Indian legislation was amended in 2005 after multiple suggestions from various Law Commissions on the matter, citing it as a necessary addition, but the Supreme Court of India does not seem to accept the idea. The Islamic concept of diyyah, or blood money, means the payment of money in place of retaliation, that is, money paid to stop retaliation for the death of a person. This paper aims to study plea bargaining from its origin in the United States of America and the reasons for its success there, the need for the same in India and the recommendations of the Law Commission reports, and to understand the concept of Islamic blood money. The paper aims to compare the three systems, to see the different approaches adopted in each system to suit each country based on its needs.

Artificial Intelligence has shifted the constitutional question away from the collection of personal data and towards the generation of new knowledge about individuals and its use to shape the environments in which they choose. Modern AI systems draw sensitive inferences from mundane data, assign persistent algorithmic identities, and personalise informational environments in ways that can influence preference formation without any prohibition, coercion or unauthorised disclosure. This paper asks whether, and on what basis, AI-driven inferential profiling and algorithmic personalised influence amount to an unwarranted encroachment on the right to decisional autonomy under Article 21 of the Indian Constitution. It traces the movement of Indian jurisprudence from the formal liberty of A.K. Gopalan to the substantive personal liberty of Maneka Gandhi, the dignity foundation laid in Francis Coralie Mullin, the privacy and informational self-determination reasoning of Puttaswamy, and the decisional-autonomy line running through Suchita Srivastava, NALSA, Shafin Jahan, Navtej Singh Johar and Joseph Shine. Drawing on a limited comparison with the European Union's data-protection and artificial-intelligence regimes, and on a critical assessment of the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 and the Information Technology Act, 2000, the paper argues that the existing framework protects informational privacy but not the cumulative transformation of data into inferential and behavioural power. It proposes algorithmic autonomy as a derivative interpretative principle rather than a new fundamental right, and sets out an Algorithmic Autonomy Proportionality Test structured around interference, constitutional attribution, legality, legitimate aim, necessity, proportionality in the strict sense, and procedural safeguards with effective remedies.

This research examines the application of the principle of balance in Indonesian bankruptcy law, specifically in the context of protecting separatist creditors' rights and workers' wage rights in the bankruptcy estate settlement process. The normative conflict between Article 55(1) of Law No. 37 of 2004 on Bankruptcy and Suspension of Debt Payment Obligations, which grants independent execution rights to secured creditors, and Article 95(4) of Law No. 6 of 2023 on the Stipulation of Government Regulation in Lieu of Law No. 2 of 2022 on Job Creation into Law (the Job Creation Law), which places workers' wages as preferred debts, creates legal uncertainty in practice. The research method employed is normative juridical, with statutory, conceptual and case approaches. The results indicate that the application of the principle of balance requires reconciliation between the commercial interests of separatist creditors and the social interests of workers through fair and proportional mechanisms. Constitutional Court Decision No. 67/PUU-XI/2013 has affirmed that workers' wages hold a strong legal standing, yet its implementation still requires more comprehensive regulatory harmonisation. This research recommends the establishment of a clearer payment priority hierarchy in Indonesian bankruptcy law as a manifestation of the consistent application of the principle of balance.

Indemnity contracts have become central to modern commercial practice as instruments for allocating and mitigating risk, yet their statutory basis in India remains confined to Sections 124 and 125 of the Indian Contract Act, 1872. This paper examines how that skeletal framework has left significant gaps concerning implied indemnities, non-human perils and the point at which liability to indemnify arises, and how Indian courts have filled those gaps by drawing on English common law and equitable principles. Through decisions such as Secretary of State v. Bank of India, Gajanan Moreshwar v. Moreshwar Madan, Osman Jamal & Sons Ltd. v. Gopal Purshottam and Jet Airways (India) Ltd. v. Sahara Airlines Ltd., it traces the shift from post-loss restitution to anticipatory protection and the emergence of indemnity as a self-contained risk-transfer mechanism. Reading these developments through the perspectives of corrective justice, legal realism, social engineering and Dworkinian integrity, the paper argues that while judicial creativity has preserved the commercial utility of indemnity, lasting legal certainty requires the legislature to codify principles such as anticipatory indemnity, implied indemnities and a broadened conception of recoverable loss.

This paper evaluates the need for euthanasia in the Indian context, with reference to how it is perceived in the Netherlands and Switzerland. The Constitution of India recognises the right to life and the right to die with dignity, but only within the boundaries of passive euthanasia; voluntary (active) death remains a criminal offence in India, and there are no statutory provisions or redressal mechanisms dealing with mercy killing. The study examines whether euthanasia laws of the kind found in Western jurisdictions such as the Netherlands and Switzerland are suited to India. In the Indian setting the judiciary has introduced passive euthanasia through a handful of judgments, yet public awareness of its advantages and drawbacks remains limited; the analysis is therefore oriented towards personal autonomy, impact and the attendant social dilemma, drawing on an open-ended, doctrinal and comparative approach.

This paper offers a critical analysis of the United Nations Convention against Cybercrime, 2025, and its capacity to serve as a truly global framework for combating cybercrime through international cooperation. It traces the evolution of cybercrime instruments from the Budapest Convention and subsequent regional conventions to the present treaty, and provides a provisional summary of the Convention's substantive offences, procedural measures and mechanisms for international cooperation. The paper then identifies a series of structural or 'tectonic' issues within the text, including the absence of any definition of cybercrime, a loose definition of serious offences, ambiguity regarding the nature of electronic evidence, an exhaustive conception of personal data that excludes corporate data, uncertainty over the nature of shared data, and the want of an oversight mechanism. It argues that these gaps risk reducing the Convention to a mere text open to misuse, particularly by States with a weak commitment to the rule of law, and concludes with suggestions for definitional clarity, adaptation to technological developments such as artificial intelligence, stronger data-protection safeguards and an effective oversight mechanism.

In an era characterised by rapid technological advancements and increasing globalisation, legal education must evolve to prepare future legal professionals for the demands of a changing world. This paper explores the adaptation of legal education through the integration of digital tools and a global perspective. By examining the historical context and traditional methods of legal education, we identify the limitations that necessitate innovation. We then delve into the digital tools transforming the field, including online learning platforms, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and advanced legal research databases. Through a comparative analysis of global legal education systems, we highlight the diverse approaches to integrating technology and the challenges faced in different regions. Case studies from various countries provide insights into successful implementations and lessons learned. The paper also addresses ethical concerns, accessibility issues, and the resistance to change that can hinder technological adoption. Finally, we discuss emerging trends and the role of policy in shaping the future of legal education, emphasising the importance of preparing legal professionals for a globalised profession. This research aims to contribute to the ongoing discourse on legal education reform and offer practical recommendations for integrating digital tools and global perspectives into legal curricula.

It was the intention of the amendments to the Arbitration and Conciliation Act, 1996 to bring about the much-needed improvements designed to overhaul the arbitration system in India. In addition to sending a favourable signal for India's status as a centre for international commercial arbitration (ICA), a number of significant developments will have a considerable impact on the manner in which arbitrations are carried out in India. Despite the fact that significant changes have been made, there are still certain aspects of Indian arbitration that are questionable and need explanation. The primary focus of this article is to investigate a number of significant areas of concern, including the perspectives of various stakeholders in the field of international commercial arbitration and the initiatives taken by the Indian government to establish India as a centre for international arbitration in the context of policies pertaining to foreign direct investment (FDI). The application of the law and principles of lex arbitri in international commercial arbitration, as well as remedies against international awards in India, has also been examined with the assistance of prominent instances. In addition, the paper draws attention to the shortcomings of international commercial arbitration in India and offers a number of noteworthy recommendations for enhancing India's position as a centre for international commercial arbitration.

Contemporary debates on taxation increasingly revolve around legitimacy rather than revenue alone. States face pressure to fund social expenditure, reduce inequality, and protect fiscal sovereignty while remaining constrained by constitutional rights, mobility of capital, and international tax competition. This study critically examines the legal implications of tax justice and equity through three linked lenses: progressive income taxation, wealth tax regimes, and constitutional limits on state taxing power. It argues that tax justice cannot be reduced to a single distributive ideal. Instead, it arises from the interaction of ability-to-pay principles, equal treatment, administrative feasibility, non-confiscation, and democratic accountability. Progressive taxation remains the most durable instrument for embedding vertical equity in modern tax systems, yet its redistributive force can be undermined by preferential treatment of capital and cross-border avoidance. Wealth taxes offer an intuitively attractive response to concentrated asset ownership, but they raise serious valuation, liquidity, and avoidance challenges. Constitutional limits serve an essential rule-of-law function by restraining arbitrariness and protecting property, equality, and due process; however, excessively rigid constraints can also disable legitimate redistributive policy. The article concludes that fiscal sovereignty today is best understood as conditioned sovereignty: states retain broad taxing authority, but that authority must be exercised through proportionate, intelligible, and administrable measures. Durable tax justice therefore requires the integration of progressive taxation, targeted capital taxation, constitutional restraint, and international coordination against base erosion.

Rani-ki-Vav, the eleventh-century Queen's Stepwell at Patan, was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2014, yet the Convention that recognises it creates no enforcement machinery of its own: whatever protection the monument enjoys must come from Indian law. This study combines doctrinal and empirical methods to ask what legal protection the constitutional, statutory, environmental and local regulatory framework confers on the site, and how that framework is operationalised in practice. A field study conducted in July 2026, comprising site observation, photographic documentation and semi-structured interviews, found the monument well conserved, secure and competently presented, but the statutory promise incompletely kept: no heritage bye-laws under Section 20E of the AMASR Act, no site-specific conservation budget, an unassessed railway risk, civic surroundings dependent on authorities owing the monument no duty, and community attachment still shallow. Reforms are proposed for each gap; none requires new legislation, only that existing law be brought to bear on one site.

Cadaveric organs are among the least utilised in India in cases of brain death, leading to an acute shortage of organs that needs to be addressed. Although the statute on organ and tissue donation and transplantation was passed by Parliament in 1994 and amended in 2011, three decades on, the cadaveric donor rate has remained below one per million population (PMP). This study undertakes a jurisprudential and socio-legal examination of cadaveric organ and tissue donation in India. It traces the legislative history, sets out the procedure for brain-death certification, examines the consent framework, assesses the central government's institutional establishment of NOTTO, and probes the cultural, ethical and constitutional dimensions of the subject. It also throws light on the leading judicial decisions that have interpreted organ transplantation as an essential element of the fundamental rights under Article 21 of the Constitution of India. The article identifies the need for structural and organisational transformation, including an opt-out consent model, improvement in infrastructure and stronger inter-agency coordination, to reduce the gap between organ demand and supply.

Article 200 of the Constitution gives the Governor three courses of action on a Bill passed by a State Legislature: assent, withholding of assent, or reservation for the consideration of the President. It fixes no time within which any of them must be taken. This article traces the provision from draft Article 175 and the Constituent Assembly's deliberate removal of the words “in his discretion”, through the settled position that the Governor acts on the aid and advice of the Council of Ministers, to the litigation generated by prolonged inaction on Bills in recent years. It examines the judicial line from Purushothaman Nambudiri and Shamsher Singh, through Hoechst Pharmaceuticals and B.K. Pavitra, to State of Punjab v. Principal Secretary to the Governor of Punjab and State of Tamil Nadu v. Governor of Tamil Nadu, in which the Court read “as soon as possible” as a constitutional imperative of expedition and prescribed one-month and three-month timelines. It then analyses the advisory opinion on the Presidential Reference under Article 143, which held that the discharge of functions under Articles 200 and 201 is generally non-justiciable, that judicially prescribed timelines and deemed assent are impermissible, and that Article 361 does not bar a limited mandamus where inaction is prolonged, unexplained and indefinite. The article argues that the resulting position leaves the Governor without an enforceable deadline but equally without liberty to keep a Bill pending indefinitely, and considers what that balance means for responsible government and for federal comity.

The safeguarding of traditional knowledge (TK) and traditional cultural expressions (TCEs) has become one of the most contested and intellectually complex issues in the contemporary international legal landscape, particularly within the field of intellectual property. Indigenous and local communities across the world have developed, preserved and transmitted these systems of knowledge over generations, covering medicinal uses, agricultural techniques, folklore, spiritual practices, art forms and ecological wisdom. Much of that knowledge now faces an increased threat from commercial exploitation through cultural appropriation, biopiracy, and the unauthorised commodification of traditional knowledge by third parties, whether multinational corporations or researchers, operating in jurisdictions outside the control of the communities concerned. Scholars and practitioners have identified persistent gaps in conventional intellectual property frameworks, patents, copyright and trademarks, in protecting the communal, intergenerational and often non-commercial character of TK and TCEs. The result has been a global movement towards sui generis legislation designed to fit the needs and realities of indigenous and local communities. This paper compares India's Draft Traditional Knowledge and Traditional Cultural Expressions Bill with the national sui generis regimes of Indonesia and Panama, and assesses each against the criteria of definitional scope, ownership, prior informed consent, benefit-sharing, recognition of customary law, enforcement and community autonomy.

This article undertakes a comparative analysis of two judgments that, a decade apart and at very different institutional scales, established informational privacy as a judicially enforceable constraint on state data practices in South Asia. In Justice K.S. Puttaswamy (Retd.) v. Union of India (2017), a nine-judge bench of the Supreme Court of India overruled M.P. Sharma and Kharak Singh to read a fundamental right to privacy into Article 21 of the Constitution, and articulated a three-fold test of legality, legitimate aim and proportionality for assessing state intrusions upon it. In Supreme Court of Nepal Decision No. 081-WO-0500, decided on a writ petition filed by a law student, Bivek Chaudhary, a Division Bench applied Nepal's express constitutional privacy guarantee under Article 28, read with the Individual Privacy Act, 2075, to hold that transport offices lacked statutory authority to publish examinees' citizenship numbers alongside driving-licence results, invoking the ultra vires doctrine governing public bodies and drawing directly on Puttaswamy itself. The article argues that despite sharp differences in constitutional text, institutional scale and remedial posture, a nationwide biometric-identity challenge decided by the country's largest possible bench as against a single administrative practice corrected by a two-judge bench, both courts converge on a common refusal to treat administrative convenience as a substitute for legal authorisation to disclose personal data. It concludes that this convergence, together with Nepal's explicit reliance on Indian precedent, offers a template of doctrinal economy and horizontal judicial dialogue for other South Asian jurisdictions confronting the privacy costs of state digitisation.

The Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code, 2020 consolidates thirteen central labour enactments, yet it retains the employer-and-establishment architecture inherited from factory-era legislation. This article examines the position of migrant workers who move across State boundaries and earn a living through own-account work, and identifies a normative paradox at the heart of the Code: the second proviso to Section 21(2) permits self-employed migrants in a destination State to register on the inter-State migrant worker portal, while the definitional provisions in Section 2(1) and the substantive duties in Sections 6, 13, 14 and 23 remain tied to an identifiable employer. The result is regulatory visibility without protection, in which registration operates as an endpoint rather than a gateway to enforceable safety entitlements. Drawing on Article 14 classification doctrine, the Article 21 jurisprudence on livelihood and occupational health, the Directive Principles in Articles 39(e), 42 and 43, and international labour standards including Conventions Nos. 155 and 187 and Recommendation No. 204, the article argues that occupational risk, rather than employment status, should determine the threshold of preventive protection. It proposes statutory recognition of the self-employed migrant worker, a minimum occupational safety entitlement independent of employment status, portable and sector-specific safety records built on the Section 21 registry, and defined public financing and institutional responsibility.

The main objective of this research is to investigate the key factors that affect autonomous English learning under the influence of digital technologies and AI tools at a public university in Hanoi, Vietnam. A questionnaire with 35 items was developed. Data were collected from 304 second-year non-English majors, who were randomly chosen from the 22 existing training programmes at Hanoi University of Natural Resources and Environment (HUNRE). The results indicate that English learning autonomy is influenced by several aspects involving digital technologies and AI tools, including learners' perceptions and behaviour regarding learning autonomy, the role of teachers, and the learning environment. The findings also support a recommendation that further research be developed with a larger scope in the context of the transformation of higher education in Vietnam under groundbreaking educational policies.

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) has entered higher education very quickly and has changed the way learners engage with English academic writing, now accompanying them through the whole composing process from idea formation and planning to revision and polishing. Its influence, however, does not stop at text production. A significant challenge for educators is the effect of GenAI on learners' internal processes, in particular their motivation and self-regulated learning (SRL). This paper examines the existing literature on GenAI, academic writing and learner psychology through Zimmerman's cyclical model of SRL and the self-determination theory of Deci and Ryan. The literature suggests that GenAI tools can build writing confidence and promote independent learning where they scaffold learners' own thinking. Where learners instead use GenAI to produce ready-made text, important self-regulatory capacities such as goal setting, monitoring and reflection may be weakened. Existing studies are almost entirely cross-sectional, so claims about sustained effects cannot be made, and work situated in Indian higher education remains scarce. The paper therefore sets out a research agenda built on longitudinal methods, theoretically integrated models and context-relevant approaches to AI literacy, offering a theoretical basis for researchers and practitioners concerned with the changing role of GenAI in language teaching and learning.

Artificial intelligence and technological innovation are transforming dispute resolution mechanisms globally, and India's arbitration sector stands at the cusp of this digital shift. This paper examines the multifaceted impact of AI and emerging technologies on arbitration proceedings within the Indian legal framework. The Arbitration and Conciliation Act, 1996 continues to be the principal legislative instrument governing arbitration in India, yet it was enacted in an era preceding widespread technological adoption. The paper analyses how AI-driven tools, blockchain technology, virtual hearing platforms and data analytics are reshaping arbitration processes, from case management and evidence analysis to decision-making and enforcement. Key areas of exploration include the automation of document review, predictive analytics for case outcomes, virtual hearing infrastructure, and challenges relating to data privacy, judicial supervision and the role of human arbitrators. Through examining contemporary developments and comparative practices, the paper explores how India's arbitration ecosystem can harness technology while maintaining procedural fairness, confidentiality and the sanctity of arbitral awards. It concludes with policy recommendations on legislative amendment, arbitrator training and institutional framework development, so that India's arbitration sector remains globally competitive and technologically robust while preserving its foundational principles.

In the modern digital economy, global technology giants increasingly use corporate buyouts to protect their market dominance. The practice is known as a killer acquisition: a dominant firm buys a small, innovative start-up not to scale the start-up's technology but to shut it down or neutralise it before it can grow into a competitive threat. These transactions pose a distinctive challenge for competition regulators worldwide, including the Competition Commission of India. Merger control law has historically relied on the assets or turnover of the target company to trigger review, and because early-stage technology start-ups often possess large user networks and considerable data potential but minimal revenue, they routinely passed under the regulatory radar. That structural blind spot creates kill zones that harm competition, limit consumer choice and smother disruptive innovation. In response, antitrust frameworks are shifting from static, backward-looking asset tests towards forward-looking, value-based approaches, of which India's deal value threshold under the Competition (Amendment) Act, 2023 is a recent example. This paper analyses how killer acquisitions reshape digital markets, evaluates the systemic threat they pose to the start-up ecosystem, and examines the emerging regulatory solutions designed to safeguard future market innovation.

The deep seabed beyond national jurisdiction holds mineral deposits that have become commercially attractive as the global energy transition drives demand for cobalt, nickel, manganese and copper. Part XI of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea declares the Area and its resources the common heritage of mankind and entrusts their administration to the International Seabed Authority for the benefit of all States, with particular regard for developing countries. This paper examines the distance between that normative promise and the practice of deep seabed mining. It traces the origins of the common heritage principle from Arvid Pardo's 1967 address and General Assembly Resolution 2749 (XXV) to its codification in UNCLOS, sets out its five core elements, and then assesses four practical obstacles: the concentration of exploration contracts in the hands of technologically advanced States and their corporate affiliates, the absence of any operative benefit-sharing, the dilution of Part XI by the 1994 Implementing Agreement including the dormancy of the Enterprise, and the environmental risks of exploitation. The invocation of the two-year rule by Nauru in 2021 is treated as an illustration of how procedural devices can be used to compress regulatory deliberation. The paper concludes that the common heritage principle remains largely aspirational, and proposes a pre-agreed revenue distribution formula, the capitalisation of the Enterprise, an environmental regime that operates as a precondition to exploitation, and governance reform within the Authority.

The proliferation of deepfakes, powered by Generative Adversarial Networks, poses a direct threat to personality rights as an intellectual property asset. India has no dedicated statute governing such rights, yet a commercially cultivated persona, comprising name, voice, likeness and distinctive mannerisms, carries substantial economic value. Confronting this statutory vacuum, the Indian judiciary has engaged in purposive judicial law-making, stretching the Trade Marks Act, 1999, the Copyright Act, 1957 and constitutional privacy jurisprudence to generate, incrementally, what this paper contends is a sui generis intellectual property regime. Through a five-phase analysis of decisions from Titan Industries v. Ramkumar Jewellers (2012) to Vikas Pahwa v. Ashok Kumar (2026), the paper traces the doctrinal arc from dignity-based tort relief toward a property-centric framework grounded in Hegelian theory. Comparative reference to the United States right of publicity and the EU AI Act shows that the Indian regime, while judicially creative, remains fragmented and litigation-heavy. The paper recommends the enactment of a Digital Personality Protection Act to consolidate the judicial architecture already in place.

Biogas represents a renewable energy pathway that simultaneously addresses waste management, greenhouse gas reduction, and decentralised energy production, making it highly relevant to global energy security. Advances in bioengineering, particularly microbial optimisation, genetic modification, and process innovation, have improved biogas yields and efficiency, offering scalable solutions for both rural and urban contexts. Despite that potential, biogas adoption remains uneven because of gaps in supportive legal frameworks, regulatory clarity, and integration into national energy strategies. Existing scholarship often isolates technical innovation from policy and legal analysis, leaving a gap in understanding how bioengineering advances can be aligned with energy security objectives under effective governance. This paper seeks to bridge that gap by examining the intersection of biogas technology, bioengineering breakthroughs, energy security imperatives, and legal frameworks. Drawing brief illustrative reference to developments in India and to selected European and Chinese experience, the study reviews bioengineering innovations alongside the policy and regulatory considerations bearing on their deployment. It argues that bioengineering can substantially raise biogas yields, that decentralised biogas adoption enhances energy security by reducing fossil fuel dependence, and that legal frameworks play a decisive role in scaling biogas markets through incentives, safety regulation, and integration into energy grids. On that basis the paper proposes a governance roadmap that integrates scientific innovation, energy security strategy, and legal regulation to accelerate biogas adoption. In doing so it positions biogas not merely as a technical solution but as a component of sustainable energy transition, linking bioengineering progress with policy and law.

The primary objective of establishing the Organization for the Harmonization of Business Law in Africa is to facilitate economic development and integration through the standardisation of business laws and practices among the member states. A fundamental element of the OHADA framework is the enforcement of sanctions. The regulations concerning sanctions are intended to ensure that businesses adhere to legal standards, with the Organisation aiming to foster transparency, accountability and good governance. Consequently, the efficacy of the Organisation's framework is contingent upon the adherence of member states to these regulations. The legal framework governing compliance with OHADA provisions for sanctions is established through multiple sources. These sources encompass the foundational treaty which articulates the objectives, the legislative instruments that regulate specific aspects of business law and sanctions within the OHADA jurisdiction, national laws, and the interpretative regulations and directives issued by OHADA's Council of Ministers and Permanent Secretariat. Consequently, the application of corporate criminal responsibility by OHADA member states has emerged as a significant subject of discussion and analysis. Although the OHADA Treaty aspires to standardise business law across member states, it delegates the particulars of criminal responsibility to individual states. This delegation has resulted in variations in the application of corporate criminal responsibility, with some states enacting penal laws to restrict corporate criminal liability while others have integrated corporate criminal liability within their penal codes.

Dark web narcotics markets are posing serious challenges to conventional narcotics investigation. The availability of anonymising networks such as The Onion Router (Tor) and the use of decentralised cryptocurrency have produced a major shift in the international drug trade. In India this has generated an evidentiary crisis in the enforcement of the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act, 1985, a statute drafted to disrupt the operations of physical trafficking networks; read with the law of evidence and the Information Technology Act, 2000, it can no longer keep pace with the investigations that cyber-narcotics cases require. This doctrinal paper examines the conflict between the decentralised character of dark web drug distribution and the exacting procedural demands of Indian criminal law. Its central problem is the difficulty of gathering and validating evidence at the investigative and prosecution stages: attributing encrypted digital identifiers to physical suspects, satisfying the demanding requirements for the admissibility of electronic records, tracing cryptocurrency flows, working across jurisdictions, and maintaining an unbroken chain of custody for digital evidence. The paper examines recent case law, in particular Tofan Singh v. State of Tamil Nadu, as evidence of a genuine tension between strict evidentiary rules that protect constitutional freedoms and guard against investigative abuse, and the equally pressing need to bring technologically sophisticated trafficking networks to justice. That analysis is supported by comparison with cyber-narcotics practice in other jurisdictions, including United States federal enforcement and Europol-coordinated operations in Europe, in order to generate workable proposals for India. The paper concludes that to counter dark web drug networks India must modernise its criminal procedure to address the particular features of investigating and prosecuting cyber-narcotics offences. The specific reforms proposed are the creation of specialised cyber-narcotics investigation units, clearer rules on digital evidence under the NDPS Act, and stronger cooperation among law enforcement agencies at the local, national and international levels. Reconciling enforcement objectives with the principles of procedural fairness offers a coherent route to an effective and constitutionally sound legal framework for this new wave of trafficking.

An outdated, paper-based judicial system cannot deliver justice in letter and spirit to a technically advanced, rapidly growing and fast-moving society. In a century in which technology is involved in everything from the needle to the rocket, the integration of digital technology with the judiciary has become inescapable, and in a vast and developing country like India a digital judiciary is undoubtedly required. Maxims such as 'justice delayed is justice denied' and 'justice must be seen to be done' apply with particular force in India, where the constitutional and district courts lag in delivering prompt, transparent and affordable justice. Responding to this crisis, the Government of India adopted an e-governance vision in 2006 and introduced the e-Courts Mission Mode Project (e-Courts MMP) as one of its components, with the aim of converting India's paper-based judiciary into a digital one. Two decades after the project was approved, that transformation is still incomplete. The e-Courts MMP therefore calls for evaluation and critical appraisal so that its achievements and its failures may be clearly understood. This paper revisits the journey of the e-Courts MMP using the doctrinal method, evaluates its three phases against official data, and flags the challenges that an e-judiciary poses to society.

The practice of affirmative action is considered to be one of the most contentious means of ensuring substantive equality in historically discriminatory and structurally exclusive societies. Even though the pursuit of equality constitutes a common goal for India, the United States, and the United Kingdom, the specific approach to achieving this aim has been unique to each state, reflecting its socio-political history and philosophy of law. India practices the system of constitutionally guaranteed reservations based on the principles of substantive equality and social justice, the United States follows the model of judicially controlled race-conscious affirmative action under the Equal Protection Clause, and the United Kingdom focuses on the principle of formal equality through anti-discrimination laws and proportionate positive action. In this research paper, a comparative legal analysis of these three jurisdictions is made with special attention to the Indian concept of the creamy layer and the mechanism of preventing elite capture in backward classes. This paper considers the theoretical basis, implementation, judicial control, and current issues of affirmative action in general and absence of similar exclusionary mechanism in the United States and the United Kingdom in particular. The paper posits that traditional identity-based affirmative action has grown increasingly ineffective in tackling the modern inequalities. In this regard, the study proposes a multidimensional approach whereby not only social identity but also socio-economic status, education, geographical location, and institutions are used to enhance beneficiary targeting. Using a doctrinal and comparative analysis of constitutional texts, legal precedent, statutory law, and academic literature, the study reveals that affirmative action needs to be continually modified in order to stay constitutionally valid and socially relevant. The research contends that the creamy layer doctrine in India can be useful in informing equality policies, although it needs modification.

This article examines human rights violations against police personnel within the criminal justice administration system, with specific focus on Vadodara City Police, Gujarat. While scholarship on policing and human rights has traditionally centred on violations committed by police against the public, this study adopts a reverse and comparatively underexplored lens: it treats police personnel themselves as rights-holders entitled to dignity, safety, humane working conditions, health, and fair internal procedures. Using a non-doctrinal empirical method supported by limited doctrinal analysis, primary data was collected through an anonymous questionnaire administered to 41 respondents drawn from various wings and ranks of Vadodara City Police, including auxiliary forces such as Home Guards and the Gujarat Reserve Police Auxiliary (“GRD”). The findings reveal a consistent pattern of high duty intensity, occupational stress with inadequate institutional mental-health support, safety vulnerability without assured compensation, acute dissatisfaction with pay and allowances (particularly among auxiliary personnel), a perceived gap between individual comfort in raising grievances and the effectiveness of formal grievance mechanisms, and significant psychological pressure arising from social media misrepresentation. The article situates these findings within the constitutional and international human rights framework, particularly Articles 14 and 21 of the Constitution of India, and Indian judicial doctrine on dignity, non-arbitrariness, and reputation, before proposing practical legal, administrative, and welfare measures to address rights-related harm without compromising police accountability.

Marriage has traditionally been regarded in India as a sacred institution founded on trust, respect and companionship. The assumption that marriage imports an irrevocable consent to sexual intercourse has nonetheless been a long-standing feature of Indian criminal law. Although the law of sexual offences has undergone extensive reform, the marital rape exception still excludes non-consensual sexual intercourse by a husband with his adult wife from the definition of rape. This position raises pressing constitutional and human rights questions concerning the bodily integrity, dignity, equality and personal liberty of women, and its continuance is difficult to reconcile with Articles 14, 15 and 21 of the Constitution of India. This paper critically analyses the constitutionality of the marital rape exception in the light of judicial developments, constitutional principle and international human rights standards. It examines the evolution of the law of rape in India, the significance of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023, and the exclusion of non-consensual sexual acts within marriage from criminal liability. The paper discusses the leading decisions, including Independent Thought v. Union of India, Justice K.S. Puttaswamy (Retd.) v. Union of India, Joseph Shine v. Union of India and RIT Foundation v. Union of India. A comparison with the approaches taken in the United Kingdom, Canada, South Africa and Australia highlights reforms of possible relevance to India. The paper concludes that the marital rape exception, as retained, is inconsistent with the constitutional principles of equality, dignity and bodily autonomy, and argues for reform of the criminal law accompanied by proper procedural safeguards, so that marriage is not treated as a defence to sexual violence. Reform of this kind would strengthen constitutional guarantees and advance gender justice in India.

Hate speech has moved from being a historical tool of social exclusion and political domination to being one of the major problems facing modern democratic states. This paper examines how offensive speech was regulated before the outbreak of World War II, looking at the role of sedition, blasphemy and public order laws in Europe and in colonial India. It then considers the transformative effect of the war, showing how the experience of propaganda and the Holocaust reshaped legal thinking and led to a body of international human rights law centred on dignity, equality and non-discrimination. The paper closes by tracing what that history means for the regulation of hate speech in the present online environment.

The rapid proliferation of virtual assets has fundamentally transformed the landscape of financial crime, presenting unprecedented challenges to law enforcement agencies, prosecutors and adjudicating courts worldwide. This article examines the multifaceted challenges confronting Rwanda in recovering assets derived from money laundering offences involving virtual assets, with particular emphasis on the investigative, prosecutorial and adjudicative dimensions of this complex problem. Drawing on Rwanda's evolving legal framework, including Law No. 001/2025 on the prevention and punishment of money laundering and Law No. 023/2026 regulating virtual asset business, the article undertakes a comparative analysis with the United States of America and Singapore, two jurisdictions that have developed relatively mature frameworks for virtual asset regulation and proceeds-of-crime recovery. The comparative methodology reveals significant structural, institutional and technical gaps in Rwanda's current approach, while also identifying opportunities for capacity-building and legal reform. The article argues that effective asset recovery in the virtual asset context requires not merely legislative intervention but a comprehensive ecosystem encompassing technological infrastructure, skilled human capital, robust international cooperation mechanisms, and an independent, well-resourced judiciary. The article contributes to the growing body of scholarship on virtual asset governance and offers concrete recommendations for Rwanda's ongoing reform trajectory.

Indian courts have raised the status of DNA profiling to a level that nearly carries proof beyond reasonable doubt, and have described properly handled DNA as almost infallible. That confidence in genetic identification rests on three biological assumptions: that an individual's genetic profile is uniform across tissues, stable over time, and naturally acquired. The authors argue that all three premises are qualified, though not, as is often alleged, principally by genome editing. The immediate forensic complication is allogeneic haematopoietic stem cell transplantation, which results in individuals routinely bearing two allelic short tandem repeat profiles distributed unevenly across tissues, a phenomenon reported in criminal casework for over two decades. Approved somatic genome-editing therapies, by contrast, are autologous and edit single non-identifying loci; exagamglogene autotemcel (Casgevy), for instance, modifies the erythroid-specific enhancer of BCL11A in a patient's own cells without touching any forensic identification marker. Heritable genome editing would introduce non-natural variation and is globally prohibited, and in 2025 a multi-stakeholder coalition called for extending the existing moratorium to 2035. This article maps that biological reality against India's forensic DNA architecture under the new legal regime. It identifies a structural gap: Indian forensic protocol provides no mechanism to recognise chimeric or edited profiles, and no doctrine to distinguish an exclusion from a discordance. It further contends that, where compelled sampling can disclose therapeutic genomic modification, the settled position that biological samples are non-testimonial for the purposes of Article 20(3) ought to be revisited. The article proposes two coordinated statutory instruments rather than a single omnibus law: a reconstituted DNA Regulatory Board, and supplementary evidentiary directions for discordant-profile cases.

Consumer preferences in India have shifted towards sustainable products and towards firms that contribute to society (Poorani & Banumathi, 2025). This shift requires firms to move from traditional business models to sustainable ones, a change that may involve altering technologies, value chains, distribution methods, user practices or organisational culture (Hernández-Chea et al., 2021). During such transitions, however, various external and internal factors can influence sales volume and revenue generation. This study examines the impact of government policy and participation, treated as one such external factor, and specifically of the FAME and PM E-DRIVE schemes, on sales volume and revenue generation during business model transitions, using case studies of Tata Motors and Mahindra & Mahindra. The results show that while both companies saw growth in their EV sales between 2014 and 2025, Tata Motors saw a decline in EV sales in the years in which the schemes concluded, whereas the EV sales of Mahindra & Mahindra were inconsistent throughout. The study finds that although government policy plays an important role in shaping the EV industry in India, several other factors influence its direction, and that the government therefore needs to strive to implement stronger measures than those already in place.

Formula One has been contested for close to 80 years and has held its audiences from the outset. The championship commands a following that extends beyond other categories of motorsport and, arguably, beyond most other sports. Part of that standing comes from the identity of the competitors: well-known manufacturers such as Ferrari, Mercedes-Benz, Red Bull and McLaren race against one another outside the market for accessible and road-legally engineered vehicles, while luxury houses such as Rolex and Louis Vuitton appear as sponsors and official brand partners of the sport. The result is a conspicuously flashy and attractive presentation that draws not only the typical petrol-head but a crowd of the elite as well. Although competition between sports cars generally exists across a broad field of brands and car manufacturers, the relevant market of Formula One consists only of a narrow set of such manufacturers, and it includes an energy-drink company that has competed for and won world championships. On paper, 10 to 12 teams contest the Constructors' Championship each season; on closer inspection, the sport turns on about four principal team players, the remaining entrants operating as mere extensions or sister companies of the same. This paper strives to understand how the regulations of a sport that presents itself as competitive turn their back on competition and antitrust law and on the core value of fair play those laws exist to protect.

Asylum is an important element of international human rights law, under which people are guaranteed protection when they have had to leave their country because of persecution, civil war, political unrest or violations of human rights. Asylum enables people to obtain international protection where their home state has failed to protect their life, liberty and safety. This study critically analyses the legal and human rights framework governing asylum protection, examining international instruments, the obligations of states and the difficulties faced by asylum seekers. The paper analyses how key provisions operate, including Article 14 of the UDHR and the 1951 Refugee Convention, and how non-refoulement prohibits states from returning people to places where they would be exposed to risk. It also considers the entitlements of asylum seekers, such as the rights to life and security, to a fair asylum procedure, to freedom from arbitrary detention, and to social and economic rights. The paper further investigates the position of India on asylum protection, with particular emphasis on the absence of a refugee law, the constitutional rights available to foreigners and the influence of judicial rulings on the protection of refugee rights. A comparison of the position in India with that in Germany and the United States shows the varied ways in which countries regulate and implement asylum protection. The problems identified include restrictive border policies, the tension between state sovereignty and humanitarian obligations, and unequal responsibility sharing among states.

This paper examines the possibility of artificial intelligence functioning as an arbitrator in India. While AI technologies can improve speed, efficiency and document management in arbitration proceedings, their use as autonomous decision-makers raises significant legal and ethical concerns. The study analyses the Arbitration and Conciliation Act, 1996, judicial precedents, comparative international approaches and ethical concerns relating to transparency, accountability and algorithmic bias, and concludes that AI is best treated as an aid to the arbitrator rather than as a substitute for human adjudication.

Section 356 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023 permits a criminal trial to be commenced, concluded and a conviction recorded entirely in the absence of a proclaimed offender whom the court is satisfied cannot presently be arrested. This article argues that the constitutional question is not whether trials in absentia are inherently permissible, but whether the statutory architecture preserves the minimum conditions of meaningful participation when the accused is absent. It develops the Participatory Fairness Framework, a cumulative test of five minimum elements: knowledge, deliberate abscondment, effective representation, evidentiary participation and corrective remedy. Applying that framework, the article accepts that Section 356 already supplies a partial architecture for each element, since sub-section (1) requires reasons recorded in writing, sub-section (2) prescribes a four-step pre-trial notice procedure, sub-section (3) guarantees an advocate at the expense of the State, and sub-sections (4) and (7) address reappearance and appeal. Its argument is that each safeguard falls short in substance: notice without verified receipt, abscondment without a defined evidentiary threshold, representation without instructions, evidentiary participation subject to unguided judicial discretion, and a corrective remedy that is conditional and time-barred. The article further isolates the distinction between a trial that continues after voluntary absence and one that begins in complete absence, a boundary preserved in United States practice under Rule 43 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure and Crosby v. United States and abandoned by Section 356. Situating the provision against Articles 14 and 21, the Strasbourg jurisprudence in Colozza and Sejdovic, and Article 14(3)(d) of the ICCPR, it concludes that Section 356 is susceptible to constitutional challenge rather than unconstitutional on its face, and proposes interpretive and legislative reforms directed at making the enacted safeguards substantively adequate.

With the rapid acceleration of digital transactions in India, driven by the Unified Payments Interface, immediate payment services and e-commerce ecosystems, the National Cyber Crime Reporting Portal has become a frontline mechanism for law enforcement agencies seeking to contain online financial fraud. The operationalisation of cyber fraud reporting, and in particular the automated and unverified issue of debit-freeze instructions, has nevertheless produced severe procedural irregularity and serious rights concerns. Under Section 106 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023, formerly Section 102 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973, police officers routinely instruct banks to freeze operational accounts, and those instructions frequently extend to distant, multi-layered downstream transactions at Layer 1, Layer 2 and Layer 3 without prior verification, notice or judicial oversight. This paper critically evaluates the statutory, procedural and constitutional mechanisms governing the freezing of bank accounts during cybercrime investigations. It shows how automated portal complaints are increasingly used to settle private commercial disputes, contractual disagreements and service delivery conflicts, effectively criminalising routine civil transactions. It subjects these administrative actions to constitutional scrutiny under Articles 14, 19(1)(g) and 21 of the Constitution of India, emphasising the systemic violation of the cardinal principle of natural justice, audi alteram partem, and it analyses the precedents of the High Courts and the Supreme Court that press for a balanced investigative protocol. The paper closes with legislative and administrative recommendations, arguing for a mandatory preliminary inquiry, the strict enforcement of lien-marking restricted to the disputed quantum of funds, time-bound portal mechanisms and deterrent penalties for frivolous complaints.

Brothels are illegal in India, and any person or group operating a brothel may be charged under Section 3 of the Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act, 1956. Yet several well-known brothels continue to operate. The critical question that arises is how these brothels remain in operation when the law of the land categorically prohibits them. Sex work carried on independently by an individual is not itself an offence in India, whereas brothel-based or commercialised prostitution has been made illegal. The Indian approach appears to be to phase out prostitution gradually while at the same time protecting the interests of sex workers, an approach that entails the shutting down of brothels. Despite substantial evidence of the operation of well-established brothels in metropolitan cities, brothels in India continue to exist. The Indian government needs to take a clear stand on the issue of commercialised prostitution. If the aim of the government is to phase out prostitution gradually, then brothels should not exist in India; if the aim is to regulate commercial prostitution, then steps to regulate brothels cannot be delayed. Whichever policy objective is pursued, it is time for the government to take steps in one direction or the other, rather than continuing to postpone the question of commercial prostitution. Sex work is not like any other work and can seriously affect the mental and physical health of sex workers. Against this background, this paper analyses the status of brothels in India, the allied issues of commercial prostitution and their corresponding effect on the sexual health of sex workers in India. The paper primarily employs a doctrinal research methodology based on an analysis of primary and secondary legal sources. It is supplemented by a limited content analysis of the first three pages of Google search results, conducted to assess the operational status of temporary and permanent brothels.

According to the Census of India 2011, approximately 26.8 million persons in India, or 2.21 per cent of the total population, were recorded as living with disabilities. Despite constitutional guarantees and a growing statutory framework, disability in India continues to be shaped by stigma, exclusion and deeply rooted social prejudice. Persons with disabilities often encounter discriminatory language, barriers to education and employment, inaccessible infrastructure, and inadequate access to social security entitlements. This paper examines disability in India through three interrelated lenses: social perceptions, legal protections and social security mechanisms. It reviews the constitutional basis for disability rights, traces the shift from the Persons with Disabilities (Equal Opportunities, Protection of Rights and Full Participation) Act, 1995 to the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016, and discusses the significance of accessibility, inclusion and dignity in public policy. The paper argues that although India has developed a stronger rights-based legal regime, effective implementation remains uneven. Greater institutional accountability, awareness and accessible delivery systems are necessary to ensure that statutory guarantees translate into substantive equality for persons with disabilities.

This paper traces the development of India's ESG disclosure and assurance system and asks whether it functions as an adequate instrument of corporate accountability. Moving from the National Voluntary Guidelines and the NGRBC to SEBI's BRSR and BRSR Core regimes, it examines the emergence of mandatory, assurance-backed sustainability reporting across securities, corporate and financial-sector regulation. As comparators it considers the EU Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, as amended by the Omnibus I simplification package adopted in February 2026, and the United States Securities and Exchange Commission's climate-related disclosure rule, which the Commission has proposed to rescind. The paper identifies the structural advantages of the Indian approach, including its India-specific ESG indicators and its graduated move towards reasonable assurance. It then sets out three weaknesses: the absence of a statutory definition of greenwashing, a fragmented multi-regulator architecture, and underdeveloped enforcement mechanisms. Finally, it addresses the widening gap between the disclosure and assurance mandate on the one hand and the capacity of the assurance ecosystem on the other, particularly for the micro, small and medium enterprises drawn in through value-chain cascades.

This paper examines synthetic media and the harm it causes women in constitutional democracies. Deepfake video, AI-generated voice and synthetic avatars now spread rapidly across social media and other platforms. The law protects rights, but it struggles to balance them against free speech. The TAKE IT DOWN Act 2025 in the United States and the Digital Services Act 2022 in the European Union show legislative effort, yet enforcement remains difficult. In India, the Information Technology Act 2000, as amended in 2008, provides criminal remedies for non-consensual content, and the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Amendment Rules 2026 now regulate synthetically generated information directly, but implementation remains slow. Decisions such as Shreya Singhal v. Union of India (2015) show the courts attempting to address harm while respecting expression. Women in politics, in the media and in the private sector face disproportionate harassment through AI-generated content, and the psychological harm, reputational damage and social silencing that follow are serious. The law permits limited restriction of speech under Article 19(2) of the Constitution of India and Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights while giving weight to dignity and privacy. Technology evolves faster than legal responses, so corporate responsibility and platform moderation become necessary alongside regulation, and transparency measures, consent requirements and watermarking offer further protection. The paper argues for a balanced approach in which law, ethics and social norms work together, and concludes that international cooperation and gender-sensitive policy are needed to reduce harm while maintaining free expression.

AI systems are moving out of laboratories and into hospitals, courts and financial markets, yet Indian law remains largely silent on civil liability for the harm they cause. This article contends that the doctrinal gap is neither temporary nor curable by analogy to existing tort principles: it is a structural failure traceable to three intertwined features of advanced AI, namely opacity in decision-making, causal indeterminacy and distributed agency. It examines the inadequacies of negligence, of product liability and of the intermediary safe harbour in the context of AI harm, and proposes a three-tiered liability framework consisting of a rebuttable presumption of deployer liability, mandatory audit and disclosure obligations on developers, and a no-fault compensation fund for victims of high-risk autonomous systems, grounded in the constitutional obligations flowing from Article 21 of the Constitution of India. The proposal draws on the EU Artificial Intelligence Act and on the proposed AI Liability Directive, since withdrawn, and requires calibration for Indian conditions.

The digital economy has fundamentally transformed global commerce, yet domestic tax systems have struggled to keep pace with value creation that occurs without physical presence. The OECD/G20 Inclusive Framework's Two-Pillar Solution, under which Pillar One reallocates taxing rights over the largest digital enterprises and Pillar Two establishes a 15 per cent global minimum tax, constitutes the most ambitious reform of international tax law in a century. Vietnam, a rapidly digitalising emerging economy that hosts major foreign direct investment from multinational enterprises, faces distinct legal challenges in implementing both pillars within its domestic legal order. This paper examines Vietnam's legal framework for taxing the digital economy, with particular focus on Resolution 107/2023/QH15 and Decree 236/2025/NĐ-CP implementing Pillar Two, and the notable absence of domestic legislation on Pillar One. Through doctrinal legal analysis of Vietnamese legislation, OECD model rules, and comparative reference to implementation in India, Indonesia, and Singapore, the paper identifies three categories of legal challenge: (i) constitutional and jurisdictional obstacles to Amount A allocation without a multilateral convention; (ii) the structural tension between Vietnam's long-standing tax incentive regime and the global minimum tax's anti-base erosion mechanism; and (iii) gaps in enforcement infrastructure that limit effective taxation of foreign digital service providers beyond VAT collection. The paper argues that while Vietnam has moved swiftly and effectively on Pillar Two, the lack of progress on Pillar One leaves a significant portion of digital economy value untaxed, and proposes a sequenced reform agenda spanning amendments to the Law on Enterprise Income Tax, the introduction of significant economic presence rules, and targeted administrative capacity-building.

This paper offers a doctrinal, comparative, and constitutional analysis of Section 6 of the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, which requires consent to be free, specific, informed, unconditional and unambiguous. It asks whether a single, bundled “accept all” consent mechanism satisfies these requirements. Drawing on textual statutory interpretation, comparative EU materials (the GDPR and European Data Protection Board guidance), and India’s constitutional privacy jurisprudence, the paper argues that bundled consent is doctrinally inconsistent with Section 6. It proposes a bright-line interpretive standard that treats “specific” as purpose-segmented consent, and sets operational criteria (necessity, conditionality, granularity, affirmative action, and ease of withdrawal) for regulators and courts. The paper concludes with practical compliance and enforcement recommendations for platforms and the Data Protection Board.

This paper compares two frameworks of ultimate recognition drawn from civilisations far apart in time and in outlook: H.L.A. Hart's Rule of Recognition in The Concept of Law, and the mechanisms that implicitly allow dharma to be recognised in the Yajnavalkya Smriti and in the Dharmasastric tradition more broadly. Despite the temporal and metaphysical distance between them, Hart and Yajnavalkya each offer an intricate theory of legal validity, of authority, and of the social foundations of norms. Hart's framework is descriptive and positivist, explaining how legal systems identify their valid norms through an ultimate, socially accepted rule that secures the stability of institutional practice. Yajnavalkya, by contrast, elaborates a layered normative epistemology in which law draws its authority from the mutual dependence of scriptural revelation (sruti), traditional jurisprudence (smriti), ethical teleology, practical reasoning, and socially embedded custom (acara). The paper sets these two recognition frameworks side by side, first identifying what they share, notably the dependence of normative authority on shared practice and collective acceptance, and then marking the significant differences. In particular it argues that Hart's morally neutral framework, which separates the legal from the ethical, is counterbalanced by Yajnavalkya's linking of law to cosmological order and moral purpose, which makes dharma inseparable from virtue and social harmony. Finding common ground between them makes the divergences clearer, and shows how different civilisations solve the universal problem of recognising authoritative norms while embedding that solution in culturally particular worldviews. The study concludes that, against Hart's position that legal validity is a social fact, Yajnavalkya offers a richer model in which law, morality and the metaphysical order are intertwined and together constitute the foundation of normative life.

Restorative justice has become an important component of contemporary debates concerning the treatment of victims, offender accountability and the future direction of criminal justice. In contrast to approaches that concentrate primarily on punishment, restorative justice places greater emphasis on the consequences of offending, the participation of affected persons, reparation and the restoration of damaged relationships. This article examines the position of victims within restorative justice and considers the consequences of restorative approaches for legal institutions and social cohesion. The study uses a qualitative, doctrinal and literature-based design. It draws on academic scholarship, empirical evaluations, policy materials and relevant legal sources rather than original interviews or other primary fieldwork. The literature indicates that restorative processes may enhance victims' participation, recognition and sense of procedural inclusion when participation is voluntary, informed and supported by appropriate safeguards. At the same time, the approach raises concerns regarding unequal power relationships, emotional harm, unequal access and the suitability of restorative processes in particular cases, especially those involving serious violence. The review further indicates that restorative practices may support community responsibility and reintegration, although their relationship with formal criminal justice requires clear institutional safeguards. The article concludes that restorative justice should be developed through a victim-centred framework based on autonomy, safety, informed consent, procedural fairness and access to support.

India's retail investing boom has produced a new class of unregulated intermediaries: financial influencers, or finfluencers, who distribute investment tips and claims about returns to audiences of millions without registration or accountability. This paper traces how the Securities and Exchange Board of India moved from an ill-fitting pre-existing framework, built on the Investment Advisers Regulations 2013, the Research Analysts Regulations 2014 and the PFUTP Regulations 2003, to a purpose-built regime assembled between 2023 and 2026. Using a qualitative, doctrinal analysis of SEBI's consultation papers, Board decisions, amendment regulations, circulars and enforcement orders, the paper reconstructs that sequence and links each rule-making step to the enforcement matters that preceded it, namely P.R. Sundar, Ravindra Bharti, 'Baap of Chart' and Asmita Patel. It argues that the resulting regime is best understood as a three-pillar, association-based model: starving the unregistered revenue model by severing links with regulated entities, drawing a testable bright line between education and advice through a price-data lag, and deterring through escalating enforcement, with Specified Digital Platforms as an enabling layer. The paper then identifies the model's limits at the edges of SEBI's jurisdiction, in the calibration of free expression and in the recovery of disgorged sums, and sets out recommendations.

Long-standing court delay in India, evidenced by a district-court backlog exceeding 5 crore cases, undermines timely justice and imposes heavy costs on undertrials, victims and public confidence in the legal system. To confront this institutional crisis, India brought a landmark legislative reform into force on 1 July 2024, replacing its colonial-era criminal statutes with modern frameworks, chief among them the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita (BNSS). Designed to dismantle procedural bottlenecks, the BNSS fixes statutory timelines across the phases of a criminal proceeding, providing for electronic registration of information, a time-bound preliminary enquiry, mandatory forensic involvement in serious cases, restricted adjournments and fixed deadlines for framing charges and pronouncing judgment. When proceedings extend indefinitely, the formal legal system ceases to be a site of resolution and becomes itself a source of harm, eroding confidence in the rule of law and compromising the guarantee of a speedy trial under Article 21. Enforcing the BNSS timelines faces immediate structural barriers, principally judicial vacancies and gaps in physical and technological infrastructure; without capital investment to expand forensic facilities and train specialised staff, evidence-processing backlogs will stall investigations long before trials commence. This doctrinal study evaluates the systemic and social effects of the new framework, compares the legacy procedural code with the enacted statutes, traces the constitutional evolution of the right to a speedy trial as articulated by the Supreme Court of India, identifies the infrastructure and operational bottlenecks that threaten enforcement of the statutory timelines, and proposes measures for effective implementation, including separation of police investigative functions, real-time digital monitoring and adequate resourcing of the subordinate judiciary.

Reproductive rights and maternity protection are inseparable elements of the human rights of women and are bound up with the constitutional guarantees of equality, dignity, health and personal liberty. The Constitution of India, together with a body of legislation, seeks to safeguard the reproductive autonomy of women and safe childbirth. The statutory framework for maternity and reproductive health comprises the Maternity Benefit Act, 1961, the Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act, 1971 (as amended in 2021), the Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques (Prohibition of Sex Selection) Act, 1994 and the Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code, 2020, and judicial interpretation has carried these rights further by treating reproductive choice, privacy and bodily autonomy as facets of Article 21. In spite of these developments, the effective implementation of reproductive and maternity rights remains difficult. Workers in the informal sector are frequently beyond the reach of statutory maternity benefits, and weak healthcare infrastructure, discrimination at the workplace and a lack of awareness prevent the exercise of these rights in practice, most acutely for socially and economically disadvantaged women. This paper offers a critical analysis of the constitutional and statutory provisions governing reproductive rights and maternity protection in India. It assesses the part played by the courts in enlarging the reproductive autonomy of women through landmark decisions, and it examines the obstacles to enforcement. The paper argues that constitutional guarantees can be realised only through effective enforcement, inclusive labour policies, better healthcare services and greater awareness among women of their legal rights, and it closes with a set of legal and policy recommendations designed to strengthen maternity protection and reproductive justice for every woman in India.

Insolvency law addresses the position of corporate persons who are unable to meet their financial obligations, and the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code, 2016 supplies a body of legal principles and procedures relating to reorganisation and insolvency resolution. The maritime industry plays a crucial role in the national and international economy, and in recent years the shipping industry has faced many challenges, including insolvency proceedings under the Code, while admiralty matters attract a special jurisdiction under the Admiralty (Jurisdiction and Settlement of Maritime Claims) Act, 2017. This paper studies the conflict between insolvency law and maritime law, which arises at the point of recovery of assets and priority among creditors of the debtor. These regimes provide a structured framework for managing the financial affairs of an insolvent entity, aiming to maximise the recovery of assets for creditors while ensuring a fair and equitable resolution for all stakeholders. Key aspects include defining insolvency criteria, outlining specific insolvency procedures such as bankruptcy and liquidation, protecting the rights of creditors, providing some level of protection for the insolvent entity, and establishing the role of the adjudicating authority in overseeing the process. Insolvency laws vary across jurisdictions but generally aim to promote economic efficiency, ensure fairness and equity among stakeholders, and encourage responsible borrowing and lending practices.

On 3 January 2026 the United States launched Operation Absolute Resolve, a multi-domain military operation against Venezuela that combined precision air strikes on Venezuelan military installations with a special-operations raid that seized President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, and transported them to the United States to face narco-terrorism indictments. The operation followed months of lethal United States strikes against vessels in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific allegedly linked to drug trafficking. Washington offered a shifting justification for the Venezuela operation, invoking self-defence under Article 51 of the United Nations Charter against an asserted 'narco-terrorist' armed attack, while simultaneously describing the raid as a law-enforcement arrest of indicted fugitives. This article subjects both rationales to sustained doctrinal scrutiny using a black-letter method grounded in the United Nations Charter, the jurisprudence of the International Court of Justice, General Assembly resolutions and leading scholarly commentary. It argues that the operation constitutes an unlawful use of force under Article 2(4) of the Charter; that transnational drug trafficking, however serious, does not meet the gravity threshold of an 'armed attack' recognised in Nicaragua and Oil Platforms; that the law-enforcement characterisation cannot cure a use of force conducted without territorial consent; that no Security Council authorisation existed; and that the forcible removal of a sitting head of state violated the customary rule of personal immunity confirmed in the Arrest Warrant case. The article further situates the episode within a wider pattern of executive practice, including sustained lethal strikes on suspected smuggling vessels, that collectively strains the Charter's prohibition on force, and it assesses the international response, dominated by condemnation from United Nations officials, human rights bodies and international law scholars, as evidence that the prohibition retains normative force even where enforcement against a veto-holding power remains structurally impossible. The article concludes that reasserting the primacy of Article 2(4) and strengthening accountability mechanisms outside the Security Council are essential to preventing the operation from calcifying into precedent.

Humour has long been a vehicle for democratic criticism in India, from the verse of Kabir to political cartooning and, more recently, stand-up comedy and digital satire. This article asks whether Indian criminal contempt jurisprudence adequately accommodates humorous expression directed at the judiciary. It locates satire, parody and caricature within the protection of Article 19(1)(a), and then examines the constitutional and statutory architecture of contempt: Articles 129 and 215, the Contempt of Courts Act, 1971, the open-textured first limb of Section 2(c), and the qualified defence of truth introduced by the 2006 amendment to Section 13. Reading E.M.S. Namboodiripad, In re S. Mulgaokar, P.N. Duda and In re Prashant Bhushan alongside the pending proceedings concerning Rachita Taneja and Kunal Kamra, the article argues that the courts have accepted the legitimacy of fair criticism without developing any principled test for humorous speech. Drawing on the abolition of scandalising the court in England and Wales by Section 33 of the Crime and Courts Act 2013, it proposes that criminal contempt be confined to expression posing a real and substantial threat to the administration of justice, so that the dignity of the court and the democratic promise of Article 19(1)(a) are preserved together.

The maritime sector occupies a central place in India's economy, both because it sustains international trade and because it creates livelihoods for thousands of seafarers. Despite the national and international legal arrangements already in place, Indian ship workers continue to encounter difficulties connected with wages, excessive working hours, workplace safety, medical support, social security and contract-based employment. The nature of maritime work, which involves long periods at sea and restricted access to legal remedies, leaves workers exposed to unfair treatment and to violations of their labour rights. This study examines the working conditions of Indian ship workers through the lens of maritime labour law, and in particular the Maritime Labour Convention, 2006, the Merchant Shipping Act, 1958 and the Merchant Shipping Act, 2025, together with related domestic and international instruments. It considers how far Indian maritime law corresponds to international labour norms and what legal and practical obstacles arise in implementation, with particular attention to occupational health and safety, living conditions on board, welfare measures, grievance redressal routes and the role of regulatory authorities in safeguarding seafarers' rights. India has incorporated a number of international standards into its own legal framework, but enforcement and monitoring remain weak in practice. The study argues for stronger regulatory oversight, improved inspection mechanisms, stricter compliance by shipowners, better access to legal remedies for workers, and greater awareness among seafarers of the rights they hold. It is intended to contribute to the current discussion on maritime labour reform by advancing proposals that would secure decent working conditions and stronger protection for the rights and wellbeing of Indian ship workers, consistently with international labour standards.

Courts in India and in many other jurisdictions have repeatedly been asked whether the services rendered by advocates fall within the purview of consumer protection. The Supreme Court of India had earlier held, in Indian Medical Association v. V.P. Shantha, that the medical profession, and by extension other professions such as the legal profession, came within the reach of consumer protection law. The Court reached a different conclusion in Bar of Indian Lawyers v. D.K. Gandhi PS National Institute of Communicable Diseases, where the question arose directly as to whether advocates are service providers for the purposes of consumer protection law. This article examines the findings and observations of the Court on that question and explores the longstanding debate as to whether the clients of advocates may claim remedies under consumer protection law.

The retention of the marital rape exception under Section 63 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 presents a constitutional anomaly within Indian criminal jurisprudence. Modern constitutional law treats dignity, privacy and bodily autonomy as fundamental guarantees under Article 21, yet the penal law continues to presume irrevocable consent within marriage. This paper evaluates the constitutional, empirical and comparative dimensions of marital sexual violence in India. It argues that the present doctrine is inconsistent with Articles 14 and 21 in denying protection to married women, and that it is further inadequate in excluding male, transgender and non-binary spouses from any legal remedy. Moving beyond a gender-binary frame, the paper argues for the repeal of Exception 2 to Section 63 of the Sanhita and for a gender-neutral framework of spousal sexual violence, substituting "spouse" for "wife", which treats free and continuing consent as an indispensable precondition irrespective of gender or marital status.

Digital technology has reordered the conditions of adolescence. It has widened access to learning, creativity and friendship, and it has at the same time made juvenile delinquency a substantially harder phenomenon to define, detect and answer. This article offers a critical narrative review of the legal, sociological and policy literature on juvenile cyber-delinquency, centred on India but drawing on comparative material. Its central claim is that cyber-delinquency cannot be treated as ordinary adolescent mischief that happens to occur online. Young people move between victimisation, experimentation, status-seeking and offending within the same digital environments, often within a single episode. Platform architecture compounds the difficulty: perceived anonymity lowers inhibition, recommendation systems surface harmful material, and gaming, messaging, generative artificial intelligence and crime-as-a-service markets shorten the distance between curiosity and serious harm, while mediated interaction dulls the perception of wrongfulness. The institutional response remains fragmented. Substantive law addresses discrete offences rather than the ecosystem that produces them; schools rely on episodic awareness activity; parental understanding of children's online lives is limited; and juvenile justice institutions lack digital-forensic and mental-health expertise. The article argues for a reorientation that places the child at the centre and pairs accountability with early help, safety-by-design obligations on intermediaries, specialist investigative capacity, mental-health provision, restorative options and legitimate pathways into ethical cybersecurity practice. It proposes a layered model integrating digital literacy, youth wellbeing and cybersecurity into a juvenile justice system fit for a networked society.

The doctrine of good faith in contract performance under the United Arab Emirates Civil Transactions Law has attracted increasing scholarly attention within contemporary debates on contractual justice, legislative reform and judicial interpretation. Although the doctrine has been widely examined from comparative and theoretical perspectives, the existing literature has not sufficiently evaluated the adequacy of the legislative and judicial framework governing its application, particularly following the enactment of Federal Decree-Law No. 25 of 2025, which repealed Federal Law No. 5 of 1985 and entered into force on 1 June 2026. This study addresses that gap by examining the conceptual and legal foundations of the doctrine of good faith and by assessing the adequacy of the current legislative and judicial framework governing its application in contractual performance. The study adopts a qualitative doctrinal legal research methodology drawing on statutory provisions, judicial decisions, comparative legal materials and peer-reviewed scholarly literature, all of which were subjected to rigorous thematic analysis guided by the Theory of Contractual Justice in its distributive and corrective dimensions. The findings reveal that the 2025 reforms have strengthened the statutory regulation of good faith by extending its application to pre-contractual negotiations and disclosure obligations while reinforcing fairness and contractual accountability. The study recommends clearer legislative guidelines, more consistent judicial interpretation and greater harmonisation of contractual principles in order to enhance legal certainty and equitable contractual performance. It contributes to UAE contract law scholarship by advancing a contemporary understanding of the doctrine and by informing future legislative reform, judicial practice and comparative contract law research.

Indian courts have been protecting the commercial and dignitary interests that a person holds in his own identity for more than two decades, from ICC Development (International) Ltd. v. Arvee Enterprises through D.M. Entertainment Pvt. Ltd. v. Baby Gift House to the recent line of injunctions granted in favour of well-known performers, yet the legislature has said nothing. This article argues that the borrowed protection currently available under trade mark law is structurally inadequate, because the object of a trade mark is to indicate commercial origin rather than to control the use of a persona, because registration presupposes a trade connection and a graphically representable sign, because the definition of "mark" in Section 2(1)(m) of the Trade Marks Act, 1999 omits voice, image and likeness, and because liability turns on a likelihood of consumer confusion that will be absent in most cases of persona misuse. It situates that argument against two recent developments, the acceptance of India's first olfactory mark by the Trade Marks Registry and Denmark's proposed amendment to its Copyright Act conferring a likeness right on every individual, and against the constitutional recognition of privacy in R. Rajagopal v. State of Tamil Nadu and Justice K.S. Puttaswamy (Retd.) v. Union of India, which supplies both the foundation of the right and its limits. It concludes that statutory recognition is now required, whether by amendment of the existing intellectual property statutes or by a standalone enactment, and that any such measure must define the protectable attributes, address AI-generated content, and preserve adequate space for satire, journalism and comment on matters of public record.

International trade has long been regarded as the engine of global economic development, allowing nations to exchange goods, services, capital, and technology in ways that raise productivity and living standards. Over the past decade, however, the steady march of globalization has been interrupted by a wave of geopolitical tensions: trade wars, military conflicts, sanctions regimes, and diplomatic disputes have introduced new frictions into the world trading system. This paper examines the impact of geopolitical tensions on international trade, with particular attention to supply chain disruption, tariff escalation, price inflation, and the reconfiguration of trade partnerships. Adopting a descriptive and analytical approach grounded in secondary data drawn from the World Trade Organization (WTO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), and other authoritative sources, the study traces how recent shocks, from the United States-China trade rivalry to the Russia-Ukraine conflict and the recalibration of Indo-United States and Indo-European Union trade relations in 2026, have reshaped global commerce. The analysis shows that while geopolitical tensions consistently raise costs and uncertainty for firms and consumers, they simultaneously act as a catalyst for diversification, regional integration, and industrial self-reliance. It also shows that the legal foundations of unilateral trade measures have themselves become a source of volatility, as the invalidation and successive statutory replacement of the United States reciprocal tariff programme during 2026 demonstrates. The paper concludes with policy suggestions aimed at building more resilient, AI-enabled, and geopolitically agile supply chains, and outlines directions for future research based on primary data and sector-specific investigation.

The Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, 2013 places the Internal Committee at the centre of its redressal architecture. This article argues that the Internal Committee satisfies the established markers of quasi-judicial status, namely statutory origin, the powers of a civil court under section 11(3), an express obligation of natural justice under Rule 7(4) of the POSH Rules, and recommendations that the employer is bound to act upon, but that the quasi-judicial label conceals structural pathologies that frustrate genuine adjudication: employer domination of the forum, the absence of any requirement of legal expertise, and under-powered enforcement. Drawing on the decision of the Supreme Court in Aureliano Fernandes v. State of Goa and on the High Court jurisprudence that has followed it, the article identifies five legislative reforms, namely independent district tribunals, a centralised external-member panel, a statutory positive duty on employers, mandatory certification of committee members, and a reasoned-decision requirement, as necessary to honour the constitutional commitments underlying the Act.

Narcotic drugs and psychotropic substances severely impair the life and wellbeing of human beings. Recognising their detrimental effects, countries across the globe have enacted legislation to regulate and criminalise these substances. In India they are controlled under the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act, 1985, which represents the commitment of the nation to anchor the Indian legal system in the international legal regime. The Act makes detailed provision for the prohibition, control and regulation of drugs, and is coherent and rational in its treatment of them. One of its important characteristics is the punishment clause, which prescribes different forms of punishment for first-time and repeated offences. Despite the profound merits of these punishment clauses, the Act has been criticised for disproportionate punishment, overcrowded prisons and prolonged incarceration. The purpose of this article is to analyse critically the efficacy of the punishment provisions of the Act. The researchers have adopted a doctrinal study and a thematic analysis of the penal provisions. The paper argues that the stringent penal provisions of the NDPS Act need to be balanced with constitutional values by integrating the doctrine of proportionality, rehabilitation, and the basic rights of offenders as well as of victims.

Prejudice consists in holding negative attitudes or stereotypes about individuals or groups on grounds such as race, ethnicity, religion, gender or social class. It is a principal cause of hate crime, in which offences are committed against individuals for belonging to a particular group, caste or community, and which may range from verbal harassment to physical violence and even murder. Pride is a sense of superiority or entitlement which, when felt in excess, leads to the undermining and disregard of the rights of others. In order to assert their superiority over others, people tend to offend when something obstructs them or wounds their pride. This article examines the correlation between pride, prejudice and the commission of crime, and the effect each of the two has upon the other. Criminological theories bearing on offences committed out of pride or prejudice are also considered, so as to offer a study of the relationship between pride, prejudice and crime with reference to criminological theory.

Equality before the law is one of the foundational guarantees of the Indian Constitution, yet its practical realisation within the criminal justice system remains deeply contested. Although Articles 14, 21 and 39A collectively establish a constitutional framework of equality, due process and meaningful access to justice, the operation of criminal law frequently produces unequal outcomes for individuals situated in different social and economic circumstances. Formal legal equality does not necessarily translate into substantive equality when access to rights depends upon financial capacity, quality of legal representation, social location and institutional responsiveness. Across every stage of the criminal process, from arrest and investigation to bail, legal aid, trial and adjudication, structural disadvantages significantly influence an accused person's ability to exercise constitutionally guaranteed protections. Empirical indicators, including undertrial incarceration, legal aid coverage, judicial capacity and the representation of marginalised communities within prisons, reveal persistent disparities that cannot be explained solely through the language of formally neutral legal rules. These patterns suggest that unequal justice often arises from structural and institutional conditions rather than from explicit legal discrimination. The constitutional jurisprudence developed by the Supreme Court has progressively expanded the meaning of equality, personal liberty and fair procedure; the effectiveness of these principles, however, continues to depend upon institutional capacity and implementation. Achieving genuine equality therefore requires moving beyond procedural uniformity towards a model of substantive justice that enables all individuals, irrespective of wealth, caste, gender or geography, to exercise legal rights on equal terms. Strengthening arrest safeguards, reforming bail practice, improving the quality of legal aid, enhancing judicial capacity and promoting transparent, technology-enabled accountability are essential steps towards narrowing the enduring gap between constitutional promise and lived reality within India's criminal justice system.

This paper examines the relationship between chief executive narcissism and corporate misgovernance, with particular emphasis on the Indian corporate governance framework. Charismatic and visionary leadership is widely celebrated, yet pronounced narcissistic traits in a chief executive officer can undermine ethical decision-making, weaken institutional accountability and raise the likelihood of corporate misconduct. The study explores how grandiosity, excessive risk-taking, limited empathy, resistance to oversight and the pursuit of personal recognition bear adversely on corporate governance, stakeholder interests and organisational sustainability. It adopts a doctrinal and qualitative approach, analysing the existing literature, the Companies Act, 2013 and significant instances of corporate misconduct. It further employs case study analysis of the Kingfisher Airlines and Punjab National Bank matters, associated respectively with Vijay Mallya and Nirav Modi, to examine how leadership traits of this kind, combined with weak governance mechanisms, have featured in the financial irregularities, regulatory proceedings and corporate collapses alleged in each case. The comparative examination highlights recurring behavioural patterns, including aggressive expansion, resistance to accountability, the deployment of corporate resources for personal ends and the erosion of stakeholder trust. The paper also analyses the legal position of chief executive officers under the Companies Act, 2013 by examining their roles, responsibilities and governance obligations. Building on these findings, it proposes a range of corporate governance reforms, including stronger board independence, transparent executive compensation, enhanced shareholder participation, robust whistleblower protection, periodic performance evaluation, ethical leadership standards and greater regulatory oversight. The study concludes that although chief executive narcissism alone cannot explain every instance of corporate misgovernance, it is a significant behavioural risk factor capable of amplifying governance failures where institutional safeguards are weak. Strengthening corporate governance structures and reinforcing executive accountability are therefore essential to promoting ethical leadership, protecting stakeholder interests and securing the long-term sustainability of corporations in India.

The Law of Similars, encapsulated in Samuel Hahnemann’s principle similia similibus curentur (“let like be cured by like”), constitutes the foundational doctrine of homoeopathy. Since its formulation in the late eighteenth century, this principle has influenced homoeopathic philosophy, remedy selection, and clinical practice worldwide. Despite ongoing scientific debates, homoeopathy continues to be utilized by millions of patients across more than eighty countries and remains an integral component of complementary and traditional healthcare systems. This paper aims to examine the historical evolution of the Law of Similars, analyse its philosophical and scientific foundations, and evaluate its contemporary relevance in modern healthcare and homoeopathic practice. The study adopts a doctrinal research methodology based on an extensive review of classical homoeopathic literature, including Hahnemann’s Organon of Medicine, scholarly articles, contemporary research studies, and relevant healthcare reports. The paper traces the development of the Law of Similars from its historical origins to its present-day application. It explores theoretical explanations, clinical interpretations, scientific perspectives, ethical considerations, and the role of individualized treatment within homoeopathic therapeutics. The study finds that the Law of Similars continues to serve as the conceptual cornerstone of homoeopathic prescribing. Its enduring relevance lies in individualized patient care, holistic assessment, and its adaptability within evolving healthcare environments. The Law of Similars remains a significant and distinctive principle in homoeopathy. While scientific validation continues to be debated, its historical influence, therapeutic application, and continuing role in patient-centred healthcare demonstrate its sustained importance in contemporary medical discourse.

This paper examines how Generation Z, the cohort born between 1997 and 2012, is changing the way social tolerance, authority and legal institutions are understood in different parts of the world. Its members are the first to grow up entirely within a digitally connected world, and their early years have been shaped by instability, the environmental crisis, saturation in technology and distrust of official organisations. The study draws on survey data from around the world, including the World Values Survey, and asks how this cohort differs from older ones. It examines three areas: attitudes to tolerance and inclusion; perceptions of authority and trust in the system; and views of the legal system and the rule of law. The findings show that Generation Z supports greater liberalisation of drug policy, wider rights for LGBTQ+ people and greater acceptance of religious difference. At the same time, it records markedly lower confidence in traditional institutions, particularly the police and political parties. This combination of openness to new ideas and distrust of established systems suggests a generation that wants leadership which is clear, accountable and willing to listen. Countries such as the United Kingdom and Kenya show different ways in which Generation Z is working through these questions. The paper closes by suggesting how large organisations might change in order to include people better and to address problems such as housing, employment and climate change.

This paper analyses the Surrogacy (Regulation) Act, 2021, the first codified law on surrogacy practice in India. It examines the state of surrogacy practice prevailing in India before the arrival of the Act, when the country was among the most favoured destinations for foreign nationals visiting India to avail themselves of surrogacy services and was emerging as a hub of the surrogacy market worldwide. The exploitation of surrogate mothers, and the absence of any law securing the rights of the stakeholders involved in the process, led first to the withdrawal of commercial surrogacy from foreign nationals in 2015 and then to its prohibition under the 2021 Act. The paper examines the growth of commercial surrogacy in India and the effects of that prohibition. It also examines the evolution of the Surrogacy (Regulation) Act, 2021 by focusing on the needs and the legislative developments which led to the passing of the new law, and the changes the Act has brought about in surrogacy practice together with the challenges associated with its effective implementation. It further assesses the lacunae and loopholes in the new law and offers suggestions to rectify them.

'Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.' - Louis D. Brandeis. The term corporate governance is commonly used in the context of compliance checklists and board resolutions, but its role is far more fundamental: it determines whether the individuals running a business can be trusted with other people's money. This paper treats corporate governance not as a formality but as the first line of defence against white-collar crime, that is, the fraud, falsification and breach of trust committed in boardrooms rather than in back alleys. Drawing on the collapse of Satyam Computer Services, Enron, Wirecard, IL&FS and the more recent implosion of FTX, the paper identifies a common thread: it was not the rules that failed, but the individuals who were supposed to enforce them, the independent directors, auditors and regulators, who either turned a blind eye or were never truly independent in the first place. The paper assesses the legal framework built to avert such failures, including the Companies Act, 2013, the SEBI (Listing Obligations and Disclosure Requirements) Regulations, 2015 and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, and asks why these measures continue to be circumvented. It concludes that good governance is not a question of whether rules exist, but of whether institutions are willing to act on red flags before a scandal becomes irreversible.

A right is an obligation upon the State to take care of the citizens of the country. At the present time most of the constitutions of the world are right centric and provide various layers of protection for such rights. But in a world of rights, there is a need for the performance of duty as well, so that the rights of everyone are fulfilled. Like other constitutions of the world, India has a specific provision dedicated to the fundamental duties, which are moral and social obligations that, though not directly enforceable, are given indirect effect through ordinary legislation. Despite this, very little attention has so far been paid to the duties. There is a need for sensitisation at every level, for the inclusion of the fundamental duties in school curricula, and for the sensitisation of offices in this regard. A great deal remains to be done in this field. This paper is an attempt to explore the ways through which these duties could be made more visible. It also examines several legislations which are indirectly responsible for enforcing these duties.

The test for inventive step appears straightforward until a more fundamental question is asked: obvious to whom? For decades, patent law has answered that question through the legal fiction of the Person Skilled in the Art (PSITA). Yet, as scientific research increasingly relies on artificial intelligence, the assumptions underlying that benchmark have become less certain. This article examines whether one of patent law's oldest concepts is equipped to meet one of its newest challenges. It argues that the overlooked question is not simply whether the PSITA should be presumed to use AI-assisted research tools, but when such tools become part of ordinary scientific practice, and it proposes a principled framework for answering that question.

The recall of elected representatives has come to be recognised as an important democratic reform, capable of improving the accountability of a representative system of government. The procedure allows the electorate to depose an elected representative, through a democratic process, before the expiry of the constitutionally sanctioned term of office. Advocates see recall as a way of reinforcing accountability, responsiveness and citizen participation, while opponents fear that it may erode the autonomy of the representative, fuel populism and cause political instability. The question has acquired particular relevance in the Indian context because of concerns about corruption, the criminalisation of politics, the weakening of public institutions, the decline of trust in those institutions and the inadequacy of periodic elections as the sole instrument of democratic accountability. Although the Constituent Assembly of India considered the question and did not carry a recall provision into the Constitution, the issue has retained its importance in debates on electoral reform. This paper analyses the nature of recall and its history, theory and constitutional implications. It also considers the arguments advanced in support of recall and examines whether the adoption of a Western recall model would assist Indian democracy.

The ad hoc international criminal tribunals, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), were the first international criminal tribunals since Nuremberg and Tokyo to prosecute the gravest violations of international humanitarian law, committed respectively during the conflict in the Balkans and during the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. Almost ten years after the two tribunals closed, their efficacy remains a central concern in debate on the design of future mechanisms of international criminal justice, including the permanent International Criminal Court. This article compares the ICTR and the ICTY across six measures: convictions achieved, length of trials, costs, involvement of victims, reconciliation, and judicial legacy. It concludes that the ICTY's absolute conviction output was higher and its average cost per indictee significantly lower than the ICTR's, but that the ICTR's body of jurisprudence on genocide and on conflict-related sexual violence was a groundbreaking contribution to international criminal law. Neither tribunal built robust mechanisms for victims' involvement or reparation, a gap taken up, with only partial success, in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. The article ends with the conclusion that there is no one-dimensional measure of effectiveness: the ICTY was the more efficient and judicially productive institution; the ICTR was the more jurisprudentially transformative institution; and a comprehensive measure of effectiveness must weigh institutional performance alongside legal innovation.

The integrity of a criminal justice system depends heavily on the willingness of witnesses to depose truthfully and without fear. Historically described as the eyes and ears of justice, witnesses in India have long operated within a precarious landscape dominated by political intimidation, socio-economic coercion and systemic administrative apathy. This paper presents a legal and evolutionary analysis of the witness protection ecosystem in India, examining its transformation from ad hoc judicial directions into a formal statutory obligation under Section 398 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023. Focusing on the socio-legal landscape of Uttar Pradesh, a state marked by high volumes of criminal litigation and entrenched power dynamics, the study evaluates the structural transition triggered by landmark rulings of the Supreme Court, the operationalisation of the Witness Protection Scheme, 2018, and recent procedural mandates. By synthesising doctrinal jurisprudence, comparative international frameworks and statutory provisions, the analysis identifies critical structural deficiencies: the non-operationalisation of witness protection funds, the absence of police accountability, and the socio-economic vulnerability of witnesses in cases not treated as heinous. The paper offers strategic recommendations, including the creation of independent witness protection cells, technological integration for testimonial anonymity, and statutory accountability mechanisms to bridge the divide between legislative intent and institutional realisation.

The Indian criminal justice system is caught between the demand for public safety and the promise that each person's rights will be respected. The Constitution of India says that people are to be protected against unfair action by the state, but what happens inside prisons is different. The National Crime Records Bureau reported in Prison Statistics India 2024, released in 2026, that undertrials made up approximately 73% of the country's prison population: people who have not been found guilty are still being treated as though they were being punished. This article examines why an accused person must remain in prison for long periods before the trial that alone decides whether they are guilty. It considers how poverty, an insufficient number of judges and delay within the system combine to produce that result. It also asks whether technological reform, and in particular the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023, which came into force on 1 July 2024, can repair problems that lie deeper in the system. Reading the case law from Hussainara Khatoon to Satender Kumar Antil against the United Nations Nelson Mandela Rules, the article argues that pre-trial detention is often used to marginalise people who are already struggling. It concludes that India should adopt alternatives to imprisonment and change the way bail works, so that liberty is secured for everyone and not only for the wealthy, and that these changes are needed both to safeguard the rights of undertrial prisoners and to improve the effectiveness of the criminal justice system as a whole.

Corporate governance is meant to be the first line of defence against financial fraud, yet India continues to witness large-scale corporate frauds despite an increasingly comprehensive statutory framework. This paper examines the persistent gap between formal compliance and actual accountability in Indian corporate governance, tracing the evolution of the regulatory regime from the 1992 Harshad Mehta scam and the introduction of Clause 49 through to the Companies Act, 2013, and testing that framework against four landmark episodes: the Satyam Computer Services fraud, the Tata Sons and Cyrus Mistry boardroom dispute, SEBI's enforcement action in Rakhi Trading, and the Punjab National Bank fraud. Adopting a doctrinal method, the paper studies statutory provisions, SEBI regulations and judicial pronouncements in order to identify the structural weaknesses that persist despite reform: concentrated promoter ownership that hollows out board independence, auditor dependence on the companies they audit, a National Financial Reporting Authority constrained more by capacity than by statutory power, weak whistleblower protection, chronic enforcement delays, and unaddressed conflicts of interest in the credit rating industry. A comparative analysis of the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany draws out lessons India has yet to adopt, including broader monetary incentives for whistleblowers, independent audit oversight on the model of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, and greater institutional investor stewardship. The paper concludes that India's difficulty is not a shortage of law but a shortage of institutions capable of enforcing it, and recommends targeted reforms to director independence, auditor rotation, whistleblower protection, fast-track adjudication and related-party transaction approval.

This paper examines the role of the United Nations in maintaining peace and harmony in the world and in protecting the right of every individual to live in a peaceful society. It explores the efforts made by the United Nations and the significant responses it has given in relation to more influential and less influential countries as they exercise their sovereignty and deal with other nations in the world. It considers the various peace operations conducted and performed by the United Nations and what the world has gained from them, the law governing those operations and the approach the United Nations takes to it, and the barriers that obstruct their conduct. It further considers the instruments available other than peace operations and the extent to which they are used, together with the effects of those instruments in matters involving influential countries.

Deportation, detention and mental health are intertwined, and together they form one of the most important yet least investigated areas of human rights. Although existing studies have addressed the incidence of depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder among deported and detained populations, this paper adopts a more comprehensive cross-disciplinary perspective, incorporating insights from neuroscience, social psychology, public health and international human rights law. Detention is conceptualised as a legal process that is anything but negligible, one that inflicts specific damage in the form of deteriorating mental health, systemic stigma and injury to communal human dignity. The discussion situates detention and deportation within international standards on arbitrary detention and on cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, and concludes that a systemic assault on the individual and on the community lies at the core of these practices. The paper examines the neurological harm caused by prolonged uncertainty, isolation and exposure to confinement. Beyond the individual, that harm erodes social cohesion and upends family systems, while social exclusion and stigma undermine personal identity and the sense of belonging within a community. The argument advanced is that human dignity is compromised by detention and deportation as larger structural components rather than as discrete administrative actions, and that immigration detention consistently conflicts with established human rights law once these practices are placed within international legal standards such as the prohibition of arbitrary imprisonment and the prohibition of cruel and inhuman treatment. The paper emphasises the critical need for both legislative and regulatory change to address the extensive human costs associated with these practices.

Family disputes are now recognised, in Jana Singer's formulation, as ongoing social and emotional processes rather than discrete legal events. Over the last five decades this shift in perception has altered the way the legal system handles family disputes, moving away from the emotionally overwhelming and time-intensive model of traditional litigation towards Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) techniques. ADR has become a cornerstone in resolving family law disputes in India, by replacing the conventional model of adjudication with a more collaborative, interdisciplinary, and forward-thinking family dispute resolution regime. It has also reshaped the practice of family law and fundamentally altered the way in which disputing families interact with the legal system. ADR covers a range of techniques, including conciliation, mediation, arbitration, Lok Adalats and counselling, applied to disputes involving divorce, child custody, alimony and maintenance. For the purposes of this paper, ADR mechanisms are limited to Lok Adalats and mediation, which serve as twin pillars of justice, offering hope and harmony in the chaotic landscape of family disputes. Their effectiveness depends on factors such as the willingness of the parties, the complexity of the dispute and procedural appropriateness. This article examines these critical aspects of ADR and explores potential solutions through judicial interpretation, while critically assessing the achievements and failures of incorporating ADR into family law through both judicial analysis and global comparison. It concludes with innovations and recommendations that blend theory and practice to cast a guiding light on the path ahead.

"Can't you understand it if a soldier who has crossed thousands of kilometres through blood and fire has fun with a woman or takes a trifle?" The remark is attributed to Joseph Stalin. War has been present from the very beginning of human society; sexual violence is ever-present in every war, and women are ever-present as the victims of that violence. Women are raped and sexually assaulted in all forms of armed conflict, by men on all sides and for all manner of reasons. Sexual violence not only inflicts traumatising effects upon the victim but also brings with it shame, dishonour and further victimisation. Gender specific violence in times of armed conflict has been prohibited for centuries, yet it remains an almost inescapable consequence of war, most frequently treated as a reward for the fighters or as a harsher punishment of enemy soldiers through humiliation. Although it strikes directly at the body, the honour, the dignity and the very being of the woman who is raped, rape was until the Middle Ages regarded as an offence against the man, that is, as an attack upon his property. Even then, it was only in the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 relative to the protection of civilian persons in time of war that rape was expressly prohibited by a global instrument. Article 27 of that Convention and Article 76 of Additional Protocol I do not prohibit sexual violence completely; they impose a duty upon the State to protect women, and so portray women as the weaker sex in need of help rather than punishing the wrongdoer. Turning to the ad hoc tribunals, namely the ICTR and the ICTY, the precedent for the international prosecution of sexual violence was established in the trial of Peter von Hagenbach in 1474. Despite that precedent, the Nuremberg trials did not deal with sexual crimes, and the Nuremberg Charter, although it enumerated even comparatively minor offences, did not include them.

The growth of generative artificial intelligence has made the fabrication of hyper-realistic synthetic audio, image and video content, commonly termed “deepfakes”, cheap, fast and widely accessible. The non-consensual synthetic appropriation of a person's face, voice and image has created a distinct category of privacy harm, endangering informational privacy, bodily autonomy, reputation and, disproportionately, women's dignity. Although India is one of the largest markets for digital content and among the nations most affected by deepfake-enabled fraud and non-consensual imagery, it continues to rely on a disjointed and largely reactive legal framework constructed from the Information Technology Act, 2000, the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021 as amended, the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023, and judge-made personality-rights jurisprudence. This paper undertakes a doctrinal and comparative analysis of that framework against the more codified regime of the European Union, comprising the General Data Protection Regulation, the Digital Services Act and, most significantly, Article 50 of the Artificial Intelligence Act, which imposes direct, ex ante transparency and labelling obligations on deepfake deployers. Drawing on recent Delhi and Bombay High Court rulings that recognise personality rights as a component of the right to privacy, as well as on empirical data concerning the extent of deepfake-related fraud and abuse in India, the paper argues that the Indian framework is deficient in definitional clarity, in preventive rather than reactive design, and in victim-centred remedies. The proposals derived from the European experience include a statutory definition and labelling requirement for synthetic material, codified platform accountability outside safe-harbour litigation, and a specific civil remedy for non-consensual synthetic media.

This paper undertakes a comparative study of how India and the European Union have approached the regulation of cryptocurrency, with a view to asking whether digital assets can in fact be brought within the architecture of traditional financial law. The two jurisdictions have travelled noticeably different roads, but both treat crypto as something that carries systemic risk and transformative promise in equal measure. On 30 December 2024, the EU’s Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA) became fully applicable, putting in place a harmonised, comprehensive code that treats crypto-assets as a regulated asset class in their own right. India has gone the other way. Rather than enact a single statute, it has assembled a regulatory patchwork built on three pillars: a flat 30 per cent tax on crypto gains, anti-money-laundering obligations under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, 2002 (“PMLA”), and aggressive enforcement aimed at offshore platforms that operate without registering domestically. Comprehensive legislation has been deliberately deferred. Using doctrinal and comparative methods, this paper assesses how well each model works, where each one breaks down, and what those breakdowns reveal about the underlying choice of design. A dedicated theoretical Part frames that assessment, placing the comparison within the Easterbrook and Lessig debate over whether digital architecture demands a regulatory vocabulary of its own, and within Edward Kane’s account of the regulatory dialectic, in which regulation and evasion continually reshape one another. The findings can be summed up as follows. MiCA’s structure-based framework delivers legal certainty but stumbles when applied to genuinely decentralised protocols, and it leaves regulatory arbitrage windows open during transitional phases. India’s activity-based approach under the PMLA is more elastic and considerably harder to engineer around, yet it generates persistent legal uncertainty and may end up suppressing innovation through the very ambiguity that gives it reach. The article argues that neither regime has resolved what its title calls the “unregulable” problem of decentralised finance, and it sketches a hybrid response: ex ante licensing combined with technology-enabled supervision, knit together through international cooperation and innovation sandboxes that try to keep financial integrity and technological progress in some kind of balance.

This research paper discusses aspects of two sets of law, one being Intellectual Property Rights and the other Human Rights. Although these two sets of law rarely coincide with one another, it is the increasing use of patents in the field of medicines that has led to the debate over medical patents violating the human right to health by making life saving medicines increasingly expensive and inaccessible for ordinary people. In the world we currently live in, having access to medicine which can save lives is extremely important, and the increasing number of patents on life saving drugs is making access difficult, especially for people living in developing countries. The objective of the research is to identify whether the growth of medical patents is making access to medicine difficult and thus conflicting with people's human right to health. The study intends to analyse whether the present framework of medical patents is at par with the needs of today's world, in which the greater part of the population lives in developing nations and does not have access to basic health products; and to understand what role the TRIPS Agreement plays in the evolution and regulation of medical patent law at the international level. It also studies the issues relating to generic medicines and the role they can play in improving global health, along with the legal issues relating to their use and legality. Finally, it studies the Indian medical patent framework and the role of the Indian judiciary in resolving disputes between patent rights and the human right to health.

The slum is commonly depicted as unclean and unsafe place with most people residing there by reason of force rather than choice. As a series of interventions have been laid out by the different governments through the years to meet the needs of the slum dwellers, less has been tackled to alter their lives. The absence of these very basic needs, in fact, affects the health and economic well-being of the slum dwellers. Presently, the government is concerned with planning the building infrastructure, which will serve as the abode for them in the future, while ignoring the present condition of living. The study attempts to focus on the view that the standard of living of slum dwellers, impacted by a lack of facilities, road and health, is closely tied to their right to live in a clean and healthy environment. Furthermore, the study emphasizes the lack of essential amenities in slums, such as safe and potable drinking water, decent and sanitary toilets, functioning drainage, proper electricity supply, appropriate garbage collection and disposal, and well-constructed, weather-resistant roads. Past attempts have only aimed to bring the most horrendous living conditions of slum residents into the limelight on account of lack of basic facilities. This paper intends to demonstrate that the need of slum residents better living conditions is a rightful extension of the right to shelter. The right to a decent shelter eventually shall be conferred. However, until then, some constructive and urgent action needs to be taken for the betterment of the prevailing conditions.

Good mental health is an essential element of the right to life and to wellbeing, and it is increasingly recognised as a basic human right both in international human rights law and under the Constitution of India. Although legislation on mental health has improved considerably, millions of persons living with mental illness still struggle to obtain affordable and good quality care. Social stigma and discrimination, inadequate mental health infrastructure, an acute shortage of trained professionals, insufficient funding and the gap between urban and rural services are among the principal obstacles. The difficulty is greater for vulnerable groups such as women, children, persons with mental illness, prisoners, older persons and the economically poor, who may face several forms of exclusion from mental health services. Against that background, this paper critically analyses the relationship between human rights and mental healthcare in India by examining the constitutional, statutory and international frameworks that protect the rights of persons with mental illness. It assesses the role of Articles 14, 19 and 21 of the Constitution in securing equality, dignity, personal liberty and health, and the significance of the Mental Healthcare Act, 2017, which adopts a rights-based approach aligned with the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. The study uses the doctrinal method, drawing on constitutional and statutory provisions, judicial decisions, Law Commission reports, government policy, academic literature and international instruments in order to assess the adequacy of the present legal regime. It also considers the leading judicial decisions that have widened the right to health and to human dignity, together with questions of institutionalisation, capacity, informed consent, confidentiality, community rehabilitation and non-discrimination. The paper identifies recurring implementation difficulties, including inadequate funding, weak enforcement of statutory safeguards, low awareness of legally protected rights, thin community mental health provision and persistent stigma. It argues that although a legal framework guaranteeing the right to mental healthcare exists, legislation alone cannot secure that right without institutional mechanisms, healthcare infrastructure, skilled professionals and supporting public health policy.

This article examines the rapid rise of the dupe, from knockoff to legally sophisticated and affordable alternative celebrated by consumers at large. Dupe manufacturers now exploit legal grey areas by replicating products with the exact look and feel of luxury goods while intentionally omitting proprietary logos or word marks. This trend consequently tests the limits of trade dress protection to their utmost extent. To defend the infringement suits brought against them, dupe makers rely on clear brand labelling, functional necessity, and a substantial price difference coupled with a distinct target audience. Brand owners answer by invoking the more advanced doctrines of initial interest confusion and post-sale confusion, contending that dupe makers harm their reputation in the eyes of the public. While examining the landmark judgments, this article analyses how courts evaluate the likelihood of consumer confusion, visual distinctiveness, and packaging similarities. Ultimately, the article highlights the judicial balance between fostering healthy market competition and safeguarding a brand's visual identity in an era that increasingly normalises imitation.

This case comment takes an alternate approach to the interpretation of Canara Bank v. N.G. Subbaraya Setty, viewing it not as precedent for the categorical proposition that Indian banks cannot take intellectual property as security, but as a case establishing the boundaries. Analysis of the transaction and of paragraphs 40 and 41 of the judgment reveals that it was a doctrine of characterisation that gave rise to the impugned transfer and to the ten-year exclusive use right. The Court, therefore, regulated the line between security and prohibited non-banking commercial activity. The outcome is acceptable, though the reasoning is incomplete, in that it did not explicitly define a functional test for an intellectual property security interest nor square the Banking Regulation Act, 1949 with the secured transactions framework surrounding intangible assets. That is what counts today. The current prudential rules do not recognise intellectual property as eligible financial collateral for regulatory-capital relief, while CERSAI registration makes intangible security something that is genuinely “seen” in the legal sense. The judgment should, therefore, be interpreted restrictively: the Indian problem is not the legal recognition of intellectual property collateral, but the coordination of creation, perfection, priority, valuation and bank-safe realisation.

The rapid advancement of generative artificial intelligence has created new challenges for child protection by enabling the production of realistic Child Sexual Abuse and Exploitation Material (CSAEM) without necessarily involving the direct abuse of an identifiable child. Deepfake technology, AI-generated imagery, and image-manipulation tools have challenged traditional legal understandings of victimhood and criminal liability. These create new risks for children through image-based sexual abuse, grooming, and the normalisation of child sexual exploitation. Against this backdrop, this paper examines whether India’s existing child-protection framework is capable of responding to the challenges posed by AI-generated CSAEM. It analyses the constitutional framework, the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, 2012, the Information Technology Act, 2000, the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023, recent judicial developments, and relevant international child-rights standards. The paper argues that although India’s existing legal framework is sufficiently broad to address several forms of AI-generated CSAEM, it remains inadequate to respond to the distinctive harms associated with generative AI. Uncertainty surrounding fully synthetic child depictions, limited obligations for AI developers and digital platforms, and the absence of a preventive, child-centred regulatory approach continue to create significant legal gaps. The paper also lays down reforms that move beyond traditional victim-based regulation towards a child-centred governance framework that places greater emphasis on prevention, and the protection of children’s rights in digital environments.

Child labour in India has undergone significant transformation over the years, reflecting changes in the country’s economic, social, and technological landscape. Traditionally, children were employed in agriculture, carpet weaving, mining, fireworks, beedi making, domestic work, and other informal industries, often due to poverty, lack of education, and family dependence on child income. Despite constitutional protections and legislative measures such as the Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act, 1986, as comprehensively amended in 2016, child labour continues to persist in various forms. In recent years, the rapid expansion of digital technology has created new and less visible forms of child labour. Children are increasingly involved in content creation, social media influencing, online gaming, digital marketing, data entry, and platform-based gig work, often without adequate legal protection or regulation. While these activities may appear harmless or voluntary, they can expose children to exploitation, excessive working hours, psychological stress, cyber risks, and educational disruption. This evolution highlights the need to broaden the legal understanding of child labour beyond traditional physical occupations to include emerging digital forms of economic exploitation. The study examines the historical development of child labour in India, analyses the effectiveness of existing constitutional and labour law protections, and explores the legal and policy challenges posed by digital platforms. It further emphasises the importance of strengthening enforcement mechanisms, promoting universal education, enhancing digital safety regulations, and ensuring that technological progress does not undermine children’s rights. A comprehensive legal framework is essential to eliminate both traditional and modern forms of child labour in India while safeguarding the dignity, education, and holistic development of every child.

Section 44(3) of the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 rewrote Section 8(1)(j) of the Right to Information Act, 2005, replacing a three-stage test (public activity nexus, unwarranted invasion of privacy, and public interest override) with a near-absolute exemption for personal information. This paper examines whether the amendment harmonises the constitutional values of privacy and transparency recognised respectively in *K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India* and the *Raj Narain* to *PUCL* line of cases, or instead subordinates the latter to the former. Drawing on the pending proceedings before the Supreme Court, including Justice Joymalya Bagchi's observations of 7 August 2026 on the harmonious operation of the two central statutes, the paper argues that the amendment's collapse of the public interest safeguard, its inversion of privacy's protective logic, and its chilling effect on journalism and welfare audits render it constitutionally infirm, and proposes calibrated legislative correctives.

The Strait of Hormuz serves as a critical path supporting the global energy supply chain yet it is characterized by substantial legal vulnerability. The overlapping territorial waters of Iran and Oman result in a persistent doctrinal impasse in public maritime law. Literature highlights an impasse between the non-suspendable transit passage regime of UNCLOS, to which Oman is a party, and the older innocent passage regime on which Iran relies, Iran having ratified neither that Convention nor the 1958 Geneva Convention and resting its position on customary law. Neither regime, however, permits a coastal State to suspend passage through an international strait, so the disagreement turns on the conditions attached to passage rather than on any power of closure. The review article synthesizes contemporary legal scholarship to analyze how the impasse influences the interplay between the public law gridlock and private commercial maritime law. The review article finds that existing international tribunals lack the ability and mechanism to resolve the navigational dispute resulting in geopolitical risks effectively being privatized and absorbed by the commercial entities. Furthermore, the paper demonstrates that the shipping industry relies on safe port warranty, war risk clauses, and force majeure and contract frustration to allocate liability when transiting the Strait of Hormuz. In the absence of a unified global navigational treaty, the global energy supply chain relies on the complexity and adaptability of the private commercial contracts to manage risk across the Strait of Hormuz.

Civil liability for breach of contract under the United Arab Emirates Civil Transactions Law has increasingly drawn scholarly attention within contemporary debates on private law, commercial transactions, and contractual justice. While contractual liability has been widely examined in relation to contractual obligations, breach, remedies, and damages, existing literature has not sufficiently explored the legal implications of Federal Decree-Law No. 25 of 2025, particularly within the United Arab Emirates. This study addresses this gap by critically examining the conceptual foundations of civil liability for breach of contract, analysing the statutory framework governing contractual obligations and remedies under the new legislation, and evaluating contemporary legal challenges affecting contractual liability, including digital commerce and international commercial practice. The study adopts a doctrinal legal research methodology through qualitative analysis, supplemented by comparative legal materials, peer-reviewed journal articles, and authoritative legal sources. All materials were subjected to rigorous thematic and comparative analysis guided by Corrective Justice Theory. The findings reveal that the UAE has established a coherent statutory framework governing contractual liability under Federal Decree-Law No. 25 of 2025. A further key finding is that technological innovation, digital commerce, and cross-border transactions continue to present interpretative challenges requiring judicial clarification and legislative refinement. The study recommends greater harmonisation with international contract law principles, contributing to contract law, comparative private law, UAE civil law, and future legal reform.

The intersection of advanced generative artificial intelligence, decentralized autonomous software, and organized crime networks has fundamentally altered the structural mechanics of child trafficking and sexual exploitation in India. This paper introduces the concept of the Cyber-Trafficking Nexus to evaluate the systemic transition from physical, geography-dependent human trafficking corridors to automated, borderless digital pipelines. It focuses on the phenomenon of "algorithmic dehumanization", specifically the use of autonomous AI-enabled conversational agents for online child grooming, the deployment of machine-learning scrapers for targeting vulnerable demographics, and the automated production of synthetic Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM). By analyzing these technological shifts against India's recently implemented penal codes, the paper exposes a critical legislative mismatch. It demonstrates that while Section 143 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS), 2023, establishes strict liability for child trafficking, its underlying statutory vocabulary remains bound to an analogue paradigm that presumes physical actions and human-to-human interaction. Furthermore, the study evaluates the procedural limitations of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita (BNSS), 2023, and Section 67B of the Information Technology Act, 2000, regarding digital evidence collection and electronic cross-border jurisdictions. It concludes by proposing a comprehensive techno-legal regulatory matrix to enforce algorithmic accountability and structural cross-jurisdictional reform.

The labour law reforms of 2020 represent a historic step towards modernising labour regulation, enhancing the protection of workers and aligning Indian labour law with international norms. They lay the foundation for a stronger and more resilient relationship between employer and employee in India, and form a significant move towards Aatmanirbhar Bharat. The International Labour Organization has framed many conventions and recommendations for the protection of workers, and the Directive Principles of State Policy in the Constitution of India provide several safeguards for them. The key reason behind the reforms is the simplification of a complex body of law. A multiplicity of statutes, of authorities and of overlapping jurisdictions had made compliance difficult, and most of the enactments, framed before Independence, no longer suited the present economic environment or the pace of technological change. The reforms bring about major changes through four labour codes, which repeal twenty-nine central laws. The codes seek to balance the interests of employers and employees; the Government's view is that they are labour centric, while trade unions allege that they favour the employer. Many provisions are new and many others have been updated. The benefits extend to areas such as fixed term employment, gig and platform work, contract labour, women workers, young workers, beedi and cigar workers, workers in micro, small and medium enterprises, plantation workers, audio-visual and digital media workers, mine workers, workers in hazardous industries, textile workers, workers in information technology and dock workers. Besides this, the codes introduce several reforms intended to strengthen the workforce and to ease compliance for employers, including a national floor wage, gender neutral pay and job opportunities, the inspector cum facilitator, an approach of awareness and support rather than punitive action, a faster dispute resolution system, single registration, a single licence and a single return, and safety committees in establishments.

The compulsory licence issued in India in 2012 for Bayer's cancer drug Nexavar remains the seminal instance of section 84 of the Patents Act, 1970 in action. The case is frequently read in India either as proof that patient health trumps patent rights or as an unusual intrusion on pharmaceutical innovation. Neither reading is complete. This article asks whether Indian compulsory licensing law has advanced from Nexavar to Zolgensma, the extremely expensive one-off gene therapy for spinal muscular atrophy. The law has advanced in doctrine and in procedure, but it has not changed in terms of remedy. Nexavar affirmed the independent justiciability of the three grounds in section 84, and assessed affordability by reference to the public rather than to the patentee's preferred pricing framework. The later applications concerning dasatinib and saxagliptin made the process more evidence based. Litigation arising from the pandemic indicated that sections 92 and 100 are available in emergencies, while negotiation and voluntary licensing remained the executive's preferred approach. Zolgensma shows the point at which this framework fails. Compulsorily licensing a patent conveys no knowledge of how to manufacture a product built on viral vector technology, and it supplies neither cell lines, quality systems, clinical data and regulatory approval nor the financing needed to purchase the therapy. The argument advanced here is that the Indian scheme is now a workable bargaining and arbitration mechanism for reproducible products, but that it lacks any settled connection with the technological and financial institutions that advanced therapies require. Evolution now demands a coherent process that links those institutions.

The formation of a government in a hung Legislative Assembly presents one of the most delicate constitutional situations in India's parliamentary system. Where no political party secures a clear majority, the Governor is required to determine whom to invite to form the government before the question of legislative confidence can ultimately be settled on the floor of the House. This exercise raises a fundamental constitutional question: whether the Governor's discretionary power under Articles 163 and 164 of the Constitution is an unfettered political discretion or a structured constitutional power subject to identifiable limitations. This paper critically examines the constitutional limits governing the Governor's discretion in such circumstances by analysing the constitutional text, parliamentary conventions, the recommendations of the Sarkaria and Punchhi Commissions, and the evolving jurisprudence of the Supreme Court of India. Particular attention is given to *Shamsher Singh v. State of Punjab*, *S.R. Bommai v. Union of India*, *Rameshwar Prasad v. Union of India*, *Nabam Rebia v. Deputy Speaker*, *Shivraj Singh Chouhan v. Speaker, Madhya Pradesh Legislative Assembly* and *Subhash Desai v. Principal Secretary, Governor of Maharashtra*. The study argues that although the Constitution recognises a limited area of gubernatorial discretion in the absence of a clear legislative majority, such discretion cannot be equated with personal or arbitrary choice. It is constrained by constitutional morality, democratic legitimacy, constitutional conventions, relevant judicial precedents and the requirement that competing claims to majority support ultimately be tested on the floor of the Legislative Assembly. The paper further examines the extent to which judicial review can operate as a constitutional safeguard against improper gubernatorial action. It concludes that the Governor's role in a hung Assembly is one of constitutional judgment rather than political preference, and that the exercise of discretion must remain directed towards facilitating the formation of a government capable of commanding the confidence of the elected House.

At a time when confidence in Western ties and trade agreements has weakened across much of Africa, the strengthening of home-grown industrial policies has become paramount. Namibia has embedded most of its industrial policies in the Vision 2030 mission statement, whose aim is to make Namibia an industrialised country by the year 2030. That aim has not materialised, and only four years remain before the target date. The link between industrial policy and ethics is intellectually rich and adds to the existing body of knowledge. Having been reclassified from an upper-middle income country to a lower-middle income country in 2025, Namibia faces multiple challenges in its economic development. The legacies of apartheid policies have nurtured a skewed distribution of assets and opportunities among Namibians, and this has to date not been overcome. The study follows a qualitative method. Industrial policies from Germany and South Africa are closely examined in order to give Namibia, and other African countries, an exemplified blueprint.

The growing use of artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping modern legal systems and raises important questions about legal personality, identity regulation, accountability and data governance in the digital era. This paper explores whether AI can be regarded as a legal person, particularly in light of the historical development of legal personhood, which expanded from human individuals to include juristic entities for practical and functional reasons. It examines whether similar recognition is appropriate for AI systems that display autonomy but lack human qualities such as intention and consciousness. The paper also considers how legal systems respond to the challenges surrounding digital identity, including the risks created by emerging technologies. It highlights the difficulty of determining responsibility when AI systems cause harm, a difficulty that often leaves gaps in accountability. It further analyses the complexities of managing and protecting data in an increasingly data-driven environment. The study situates these issues within the broader need for legal adaptation in response to rapidly advancing technologies.