Volume 9, Issue V / 2026

Generative artificial intelligence increasingly mediates not only what institutions decide, but how institutions interpret people. Large language models draft case summaries, student feedback, performance reviews, clinical notes, policy briefs, creative text and administrative explanations. Existing AI governance frameworks appropriately emphasise accuracy, fairness, transparency, accountability and human oversight, yet these categories do not fully capture a distinct humanities problem: a fluent machine-generated interpretation can become institutionally authoritative before the person concerned has meaningfully articulated, contextualised or contested the account. This paper develops a person-centred framework of hermeneutic sovereignty for generative AI. Using an interdisciplinary conceptual methodology, it synthesises philosophical hermeneutics, epistemic injustice, narrative identity, human factors research, empirical studies of generative AI and contemporary governance frameworks. Hermeneutic sovereignty is defined as the situated and relational standing and capacity of persons and communities to participate meaningfully in constructing, contextualising, contesting, pluralising, revising and, where appropriate, refusing interpretations of their own experiences, identities, intentions, reasons and circumstances when those interpretations are mediated by AI. The paper identifies four mechanisms of AI-mediated interpretive foreclosure: interpretive pre-emption, hermeneutic compression, authority laundering and recursive fixation. It then proposes six dimensions for evaluating hermeneutic sovereignty and an Interpretive Foreclosure Test for institutional workflows. The analysis shows that human oversight is insufficient when the human merely approves a machine-framed account. Responsible adoption requires governance of the meaning-making process itself, including human-first elicitation, source-to-summary traceability, visible uncertainty, plural framing, contestability, correction propagation and time-bounded interpretive records. The paper concludes that trustworthy AI must preserve not only a human role in decisions, but a meaningful human standing in the production of the interpretations on which decisions depend.

In line with the global digital transformation trend, economic organisations and State management agencies are increasingly moving data to cloud platforms because of significant advantages such as lower costs, faster deployment and execution, and substantial improvements in employee productivity. In the context of data being stored across multiple countries, the involvement of numerous intermediaries, and the growing risk of cyberattacks, clearly defining the legal obligations and liabilities of actors throughout the cloud computing service supply chain has become an urgent requirement. Based on an assessment of the current legal framework in Vietnam, the author identifies legal gaps concerning the allocation of liability, cross-border data flow governance, and mechanisms for compensation for damage. On that basis, the article proposes solutions for improving the legal framework so as to balance the objectives of digital economic development and the protection of fundamental human rights.

The Secured Transactions in Movable Assets Act 2017 (STMA) of Nigeria is a major reform of the secured-credit architecture of the country. It provides a statutory framework for the creation, perfection, registration, prioritisation and realisation of security interests in movable assets. The reform is significant because it enables borrowers to use tangible and intangible movable property as collateral without necessarily surrendering possession of productive assets. This article examines whether the STMA provides a sufficiently certain legal framework for creditors, borrowers, grantors and competing claimants, with particular emphasis on the relationship between statutory rights and practical enforceability. The study adopted a doctrinal legal research methodology and analysed the statutory provisions of the STMA alongside relevant regulatory materials, authoritative institutional publications and verified scholarly literature. The 2020 documentary report on secured-transactions and credit-reporting reforms is employed as contemporaneous evidence of implementation concerns, particularly those relating to judicial capacity, creditor confidence, enforcement and dispute resolution. The article found that the STMA established a relatively comprehensive statutory architecture, particularly through its rules on security creation, registration, prioritisation and realisation. However, legal certainty is weakened where the statutory regime intersects with other registration systems, including company-charge registration, and where the effectiveness of enforcement depends upon judicial interpretation, institutional capacity and procedural clarity. The article further argued that the emphasis by the Act on registration-based priority creates substantial predictability but also makes the accuracy, accessibility and interoperability of registration systems central to the integrity of the legal framework. The article concluded that the principal challenge is no longer the absence of a statutory basis for movable-asset security but ensuring that the statutory framework operates coherently across institutions and produces predictable enforcement outcomes. It recommended greater institutional coordination, continuing judicial specialisation, clearer procedural mechanisms for dispute resolution, and closer harmonisation between the STMA and related legal regimes.

Buddhist philosophy is rooted in the ethical norms of compassion, non-violence, equality, justice, and the welfare of all sentient beings. Although these values are widely recognised as essential principles of modern democracy and human rights, they were taught by Gautama Buddha more than two thousand five hundred years ago. As the birthplace of the Buddha, Nepal has a distinctive historical and cultural connection with these teachings. This study examines the extent to which Buddhist philosophy is reflected in the fundamental rights guaranteed by the Constitution of Nepal. The analysis shows that many constitutional rights, among them the rights to life, freedom, equality, justice, education, health, religious freedom, and social justice, are consistent with the ethical principles of Buddhist philosophy.

Section 111 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 (BNS) places organised crime within India’s general penal law and expressly includes cyber-crimes among the forms of conduct capable of falling within that offence. The inclusion is consequential, but it can also mislead. A cyber offence does not become organised crime merely because it is technologically sophisticated, financially large, committed by several persons, or spread across multiple jurisdictions. Section 111 requires a more demanding combination: continuing unlawful activity, an organised crime syndicate, a legally relevant nexus between the accused and that syndicate, specified unlawful means, and a material-benefit objective. This paper examines that threshold through the text of Section 111, the jurisprudence developed under the Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act, 1999 and the earliest High Court decisions applying the BNS provision. It argues that Section 111 should be interpreted as an enterprise-oriented offence rather than an aggravated form of ordinary cybercrime. Particular attention is given to recurring phishing and investment-fraud networks, mule-account structures, ransomware groups, decentralised digital syndicates, and the evidentiary problem of attributing membership or knowing participation in online criminal networks. The paper proposes a seven-part judicial framework designed to preserve Section 111 for durable criminal enterprises while preventing its routine use in ordinary multi-accused cyber-fraud prosecutions. Such an approach gives effect to legislative purpose without sacrificing legality, proportionality and individualised criminal responsibility.

Consent is the principal legitimating device of contemporary data-protection law, yet digital interfaces increasingly shape rather than merely record individual choice. This article examines whether consent obtained through dark patterns can satisfy the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 (DPDP Act) and the constitutional requirement of informational autonomy. It adopts a doctrinal and interdisciplinary methodology, analysing the DPDP Act, the Digital Personal Data Protection Rules, 2025, Indian constitutional privacy jurisprudence, consumer-protection regulation, the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and behavioural scholarship on interface manipulation. The article finds that section 6 of the DPDP Act imposes a demanding cumulative standard requiring voluntariness, purpose specificity, adequate information, freedom from impermissible conditions and unmistakable affirmative conduct but the framework does not expressly identify manipulative design, specify interface-neutrality duties, or create a direct evidentiary presumption against consent collected through prohibited dark patterns. Fragmented enforcement between data-protection and consumer-protection institutions may therefore permit formal compliance while substantive autonomy is impaired. Comparative experience also shows that disclosure and consent alone cannot correct structural power, cognitive overload and dependency on dominant platforms. The article argues that dark patterns materially affecting a data decision should create a rebuttable presumption that consent is invalid. It proposes coordinated enforcement, symmetrical choice architecture, purpose-specific consent, auditable consent records, design-risk assessments and fiduciary-style duties for high-risk data fiduciaries. The conclusion is that Indian data-protection law should retain consent, but reposition it within an accountability framework in which data fiduciaries bear responsibility for proving not merely that a click occurred, but that the digital environment enabled a genuine choice.

The advent of the twenty-first century has precipitated an ontological crisis within the traditional architecture of criminal law. Historically anchored in the foundational pillars of individual moral culpability (mens rea) and strict territorial jurisdiction, contemporary penal jurisprudence is increasingly ill-equipped to address the unprecedented challenges posed by rapid technological advancement and systemic environmental degradation. This article critically examines the shifting paradigms of criminal liability across two distinct frontiers: the internal erosion of human agency and the external expansion of spatial jurisdiction. By analyzing the nascent fields of neuro-criminology and algorithmic predictive policing, the study investigates how structural brain imaging and machine learning are challenging the classical legal presumption of free will, forcing a precarious transition from retributive justice to pre-emptive, biological, and risk-based models of culpability. Concurrently, the paper addresses the dissolution of traditional terrestrial boundaries by evaluating the jurisdictional voids inherent in extra-terrestrial space crimes and the urgent normative imperative to codify planetary ecocide as a strict liability international offense. Adopting a rigorous doctrinal and analytical methodology, this research synthesizes emerging legal theories, international frameworks, and contemporary moral debates surrounding decriminalization and genetic manipulation. The central thesis argues that the existing legal architecture cannot merely be amended; it must be fundamentally reconstructed. The article concludes that securing justice in future decades demands a recalibrated jurisprudential model, one that mandates neuro-algorithmic transparency to safeguard the constitutional presumption of innocence, while simultaneously establishing a robust framework of “Planetary Jurisdiction” to prosecute transnational and extra-terrestrial harms.

Artificial intelligence is entering Indian criminal justice through expanding data infrastructure, analytics and machine-learning tools. Predictive policing promises better deployment of scarce police resources, earlier identification of crime patterns and faster investigation. Its constitutional difficulty, however, is not confined to technical error. Police data are produced by earlier enforcement choices; a model trained on such data may convert unequal visibility into a forecast of unequal risk. Opacity can then prevent an affected person from discovering or contesting the basis of surveillance, intervention, bail or sentencing. This paper uses a doctrinal and comparative method to examine predictive policing under Articles 14 and 21 of the Constitution of India, the emerging Digital Personal Data Protection framework, the United States decision in State v. Loomis, and the European Union's risk-based regulation of artificial intelligence. It argues for a constitutional permission line: place-based analytics may assist non-coercive resource allocation when supported by law, necessity, audited data and public oversight, but a person-based score must never create suspicion, justify coercive police action, or determine a judicial outcome. The paper proposes statutory authorization, algorithmic impact assessment, data-quality and equality audits, meaningful disclosure, contestability, human responsibility, procurement controls, independent supervision and sunset review. These safeguards treat efficiency as a legitimate public objective while preserving the rule that coercive state power must rest on lawful, individualized and reviewable reasons.

The widespread adoption of generative artificial intelligence (AI) has significantly transformed the way people acquire knowledge, solve problems, and make decisions in both academic and professional settings. While these technologies improve efficiency and accessibility, their growing use has raised important psychological concerns regarding excessive reliance on AI for cognitive tasks. One emerging issue is AI dependency, where individuals increasingly shift mental effort to AI systems, a process commonly described as cognitive offloading. This study presents a conceptual analysis of how sustained engagement with generative AI may influence human thinking, reasoning, and decision-making. Drawing upon theories from cognitive psychology, distributed cognition, metacognition, and human–AI interaction, the paper examines the psychological mechanisms through which generative AI encourages the transfer of cognitive effort from individuals to intelligent systems. It further explores the potential impact of this shift on critical thinking, independent problem-solving, cognitive autonomy, and the quality of human decision-making. The study also discusses the circumstances under which cognitive offloading can serve as a beneficial strategy for improving efficiency, as well as the conditions in which prolonged dependence on AI may gradually weaken essential cognitive skills. Particular attention is given to factors such as user expertise, task complexity, and patterns of AI use that may shape these outcomes. By integrating insights from existing interdisciplinary literature, this paper develops a comprehensive conceptual framework explaining the relationship between generative AI use, cognitive offloading, and psychological dependency. The study aims to provide a theoretical foundation for future empirical research while offering practical insights for educators, technology developers, and policymakers seeking to encourage responsible AI use, strengthen AI literacy, and preserve human cognitive autonomy in an increasingly AI-driven society.

This paper examines how e-filing and video hearings have altered courtroom advocacy in India and asks when digital procedure advances, rather than weakens, constitutional justice. It adopts a doctrinal and analytical methodology, drawing on legislation, Supreme Court decisions, the e-Committee's model rules, official policy documents, and comparative scholarship on remote adjudication. The study finds that e-filing can reduce transaction costs, improve document control, and make case management more transparent, while video hearings can preserve continuity and remove geographical barriers. These gains, however, are uneven. Connectivity failures, inaccessible platforms, inadequate lawyer-client communication, diminished control over witnesses, data-security risks, and the loss of some non-verbal interaction can materially affect participation and equality of arms. The paper argues that the binary choice between physical and virtual courts is conceptually mistaken. Its principal contribution is a functional-suitability model: routine, document-centred, and case-management proceedings should ordinarily remain digitally accessible; credibility-sensitive evidence, serious criminal trials, and matters involving vulnerable participants should attract a rebuttable preference for physical hearing. Any departure should be supported by recorded reasons and effective participation safeguards. The paper concludes that technology is constitutionally legitimate not because it is faster, but because it can expand meaningful access without reducing fair hearing guarantees. A rights-sensitive hybrid system, supported by assisted digital access, interoperable filing standards, secure infrastructure, reasoned mode-selection, and continuing professional training, offers the most defensible path for Indian courts.

Patent filing in generative artificial intelligence has moved from a niche activity to one of the fastest-growing segments of the global patent system. The World Intellectual Property Organisation's 2026 update records that published generative-AI patent families rose from roughly 14,000 in 2023 to over 37,800 in 2025, with more than 56,000 families published across 2024 and 2025 combined, a volume exceeding the entire preceding decade. Ownership is concentrated: China accounts for the largest share, SoftBank has become the single largest corporate holder with almost 3,000 families, and a small set of conglomerates dominate the remaining top ranks. This concentration, layered onto an already dense set of overlapping claims on model architectures, training methods and specialised hardware, has revived a long-standing competition-law concern: the patent thicket. The April 2026 launch of the Shared AI License (SAIL) Foundation by Anthropic, IBM, Meta, Microsoft and Genentech, pooling more than 33,000 patent families, is the clearest institutional response to date, but its scope is narrower and its internal distribution of bargaining power more skewed than the coverage it has received suggests. This paper examines whether Indian law is equipped to respond. It reviews the Patents Act 1970 and the Competition Act 2002, situates them against the compulsory-licensing, FRAND and essential-facilities doctrines developed in the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom and China, and incorporates CCI's October 2025 market study on AI and the Supreme Court's September 2025 order in the Ericsson/Monsanto litigation, which narrowed rather than expanded the Commission's jurisdiction over patent-licensing conduct. The paper argues that India's principal statutory tool against patent aggregation, the compulsory licence under Chapter XVI of the Patents Act, is structurally unsuited to a thicket problem, and that competition-law intervention is now a weaker prospect than earlier commentary assumed. It closes with a set of remedies assessed on their actual, rather than assumed, capacity to work.

Globalization has altered the knowledge, skills, and professional environments for which Indian law schools prepare their students. This article examines whether the resulting transformation has produced a legal-education system that is globally competent without becoming institutionally unequal or intellectually detached from Indian constitutional and social realities. It adopts a qualitative doctrinal method and analyses the Advocates Act, 1961, the Bar Council of India Rules of Legal Education, judicial decisions on professional regulation, higher-education policy, and selected scholarship on globalization, clinical education, and decolonization. The study finds that globalization has widened curricula, encouraged interdisciplinary and experiential teaching, expanded international collaboration, and increased the value of research and digital competence. Yet these gains are distributed unevenly. Resource-rich institutions can translate global exposure into clinics, databases, exchanges, and employment networks, while many affiliated colleges remain constrained by faculty shortages, weak infrastructure, and formal compliance. A second tension arises when global relevance is equated with the transplantation of Western materials rather than the comparative study of Indian problems. The article argues for a layered-convergence model: a nationally enforceable professional floor; differentiated institutional support; locally grounded constitutional, customary, and socio-legal study; and global or technological specialization built above that foundation. It concludes that globalization should be judged not by the number of foreign subjects or partnerships a law school advertises, but by whether global knowledge improves professional competence, public service, research quality, and equal access across the legal-education system.

This article evaluates whether the Bar Council of India (BCI) converts its broad statutory powers into effective safeguards for professional competence, ethical practice, and the quality of legal education. It addresses a recurring gap between the formal design of the Advocates Act, 1961 and the observable capacity of the regulatory system to deliver timely, consistent, and transparent outcomes. The research uses a doctrinal and analytical method. It examines legislation, Bar Council rules, judicial decisions, official committee and Law Commission materials, and selected regulatory practices in the United Kingdom and the United States. The analysis finds that a unified national framework remains valuable, but its credibility is weakened by delayed disciplinary proceedings, uneven sanctions, sparse publication of institutional data, fragmented digital processes, and continuing disparities among law colleges. Comparative analysis also shows that regulatory independence, accessible enforcement records, continuing professional development, and reliable case-management systems can improve accountability without displacing professional autonomy. The article concludes that reform should combine enforceable disposal timelines, reasoned sanction guidelines, public reporting, independent and regular educational audits, stronger clinical and ethics instruction, and a more credible entry-to-practice assessment. These measures would better connect the BCI's legal authority to its public-interest responsibility for the competence and integrity of the Indian Bar.

Material Adverse Change (“MAC”) or Material Adverse Effect (“MAE”) clauses are the principal contractual device by which acquirers allocate the risk of deterioration in a target company's business during the interim period between signing and closing. The reason for this is that a modern-day merger agreement will always include an arbitration clause and so any dispute regarding the assertion, or the refusal, to assert the MAC clause would raise the preliminary issue of jurisdiction: does the arbitral tribunal have the jurisdiction to rule on whether a MAC has taken place, and if yes, the jurisdiction to rule on its own jurisdiction to do so? This paper will discuss the construction of MAC provisions by the Delaware courts, the jurisdiction framework regarding arbitral competence after a disputed termination, and three common issues - emergency or interim relief, statutory or regulatory override, and the arbitrability of fraud - which determine whether a failed deal is solved via efficient arbitral adjudication or via multi-forum fragmentation. Relying on judicial decisions from Delaware, England, and India, the paper will argue that although the principle of separability provides a strong immunity for the arbitration clause from the collapse of the underlying contract, the effective jurisdiction of the arbitral tribunal is conditional, specific to the facts and fragile at exactly those points where public policy concerns, urgency, and fraud meet.

Despite being carried out in India since 1951, cloud seeding, a weather modification technique that artificially induces rain to increase water supply, has not been thoroughly analysed with respect to its legality. Therefore, the main question this article addresses is whether cloud seeding is a lawful means of ensuring the right to water in India. To find reasonable answers, the legal principles of rightful purpose and rightful conduct are evaluated using doctrinal and normative methods to assess the legality. Additionally, qualitative content analysis is used to examine cloud-seeding operations in India. This article aims to address a research gap by providing a comprehensive legal analysis of previous scholarly work on cloud seeding. While earlier studies mainly focused on technological, environmental, or operational aspects, this article makes an innovative contribution by systematically compiling and analysing historical and current cloud-seeding experiments, with a focus on unresolved legal issues and their implications under Indian law.

Narco-analysis occupies an uneasy position between investigative innovation and constitutional restraint. This article examines whether its use upon suspects in India can be reconciled with the privilege against self-incrimination, personal liberty, privacy, fair-trial guarantees, and medical ethics. It adopts a doctrinal methodology, analysing the Constitution of India, the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023, the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, 2023, leading judicial decisions, and international human-rights and professional standards. The article also evaluates the technique’s scientific premise and the evidentiary distinction between a subject’s responses and independently proved discoveries arising from those responses. It argues that chemical disinhibition does not produce truth: sedation may reduce resistance while simultaneously increasing suggestibility, confusion, compliance, and confabulation. The Supreme Court’s decisions in Selvi v. State of Karnataka and Amlesh Kumar v. State of Bihar correctly prohibit involuntary testing, exclude the test report as direct evidence, and deny any indefeasible right to demand the procedure. Yet the category of “voluntary” testing remains ethically and constitutionally unstable because custody distorts choice and sedation weakens the continuing capacity to withdraw. The article concludes that investigators should ordinarily prefer reliable, non-invasive methods. If voluntary narco-analysis is retained at all, it must be confined to an exceptional, court-supervised defence request, supported by independent legal advice, medical screening, recorded and continuing consent, strict confidentiality, and corroboration of every derivative fact. These safeguards are necessary but do not transform an unreliable technique into proof.

This article examines whether Section 111 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 (BNS) creates a coherent national response to organized crime or merely transfers the vocabulary of special State legislation into the general penal code. It adopts a doctrinal method, analyzing the text and internal structure of Section 111, its relationship with the Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act, 1999 (MCOCA), relevant Supreme Court jurisprudence, constitutional guarantees, and the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime. The article finds that Section 111 achieves substantive centralization by defining organized crime, organized crime syndicates, continuing unlawful activity, derivative participation, and proceeds-based liability for the whole country. Yet it leaves procedure comparatively fragmented. Unlike the MCOCA model from which much of its terminology is drawn, the BNS does not itself create a tailored approval, sanction, evidentiary, interception, bail, or trial architecture. This asymmetry increases the risk that an enterprise offence will be used as an aggravated label for ordinary multi-accused crime. The article argues for a strict, element-by-element construction: the prosecution should establish a qualifying course of unlawful activity, a legally identifiable syndicate, a nexus between that enterprise and the accused, the use of specified unlawful means, and a material-benefit objective. It further proposes senior-level charging review, a written predicate-offence matrix, differentiated mens rea for secondary liability, coordinated financial investigation, effective witness protection, and reasoned prosecutorial election where special statutes overlap. These safeguards would preserve the national reach of Section 111 while protecting legality, proportionality, individualized responsibility, and fair procedure.

Blue cities are cities that plan themselves around water rather than against it: rainwater is stored, recycled and reused, streets and parks are given permeable surfaces, wetlands and lakes are protected and restored, and coastal settlements are defended by mangrove belts and flood-resistant construction. Rivers, lakes, drainage, drinking water supply, sewage and storm water are treated as one interconnected system, and nature-based solutions such as rain gardens, bioswales and urban forests are preferred to concrete drains that push water downstream. The concept matters most in the Global South, where Jakarta is sinking through groundwater over-extraction, Mumbai floods every monsoon because of poor drainage and construction on wetlands, and Cape Town came close to running dry during its “Day Zero” crisis. This paper examines why blue cities and consistent green laws are needed, drawing on drought, excess rainfall and flooding, environmental degradation, climate-driven displacement and public health in India and elsewhere in the Global South, and considers how the blue-green infrastructure approach can be implemented, before analysing the experience of Rotterdam, Singapore and Cape Town. It argues that water should be treated as a resource to be planned with, not a threat to be engineered away.

Digital communication has widened women’s access to education, work, commerce and public debate, but it has also enabled persistent and scalable forms of gender-based abuse. This article examines whether Indian law provides a coherent response to cyberstalking, impersonation, doxxing, sextortion, voyeurism, non-consensual dissemination of intimate images and sexually explicit deepfakes. It uses a doctrinal and analytical method, drawing on constitutional provisions, the Information Technology Act, 2000, the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023, procedural and evidentiary legislation, intermediary rules and leading judicial decisions. The analysis finds that India has numerous applicable provisions, but they are distributed across statutes framed around different legal interests such as privacy, obscenity, stalking, intimidation, cheating and data protection. This fragmentation produces uncertainty in offence selection, reporting, evidence preservation and content removal. The central deficiency is the absence of a comprehensive, consent-centred offence covering the creation, threatened distribution and distribution of authentic, altered or wholly artificial intimate material. The article further finds that legal protection is weakened by underreporting, jurisdictional delay, uneven forensic capacity, dependence on platform-held information and recurrent re-uploading of harmful content. It concludes that effective reform must combine precise substantive law with immediate evidence-preservation protocols, specialised investigative and prosecutorial support, coordinated intermediary action and survivor-centred safeguards. Such an approach would protect privacy and dignity without reviving vague restrictions on lawful online expression.

This paper critically evaluates the adequacy of Section 66D of the Information Technology Act, 2000 in addressing the emerging phenomenon of digital arrest scams and advanced forms of personation facilitated by contemporary digital technologies. Digital arrest constitutes a sophisticated social-engineering fraud in which offenders impersonate police officers, judicial authorities, or regulatory officials through video-conferencing platforms, fabricated electronic documents, and increasingly artificial-intelligence-generated voice and video content, thereby inducing victims to transfer substantial sums under threat of imminent arrest or prosecution. The study adopts a doctrinal research methodology supplemented by an interdisciplinary examination of cyber-forensics, electronic evidence rules under the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, 2023, and the organised-crime provisions of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023. The analysis demonstrates that while Section 66D is technologically neutral and doctrinally capable of covering the core elements of cheating by personation through a communication device, its maximum punishment of three years’ imprisonment and fine of one lakh rupees is disproportionately low when measured against the gravity of organised digital-arrest operations that routinely involve mule-account networks, cross-border elements, and significant psychological and financial harm to victims, particularly senior citizens. The paper further identifies structural gaps relating to the absence of aggravated-personation categories, limited recovery mechanisms for defrauded funds, and persistent challenges of digital attribution and international cooperation. It concludes that Section 66D remains a necessary but insufficient instrument and recommends legislative recalibration through graded punishment structures, explicit recognition of aggravating factors including impersonation of public authorities and use of synthetic media, and the development of coordinated financial-freezing and victim-restoration protocols.

The 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea was adopted before climate change became a central concern of international environmental law, and it is not a climate treaty. Its provisions on the protection of the marine environment nevertheless supply a working framework for climate-related marine harm, and the 2024 Advisory Opinion of the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea has strengthened that link by recognizing that anthropogenic greenhouse-gas emissions can constitute pollution of the marine environment within the meaning of the Convention. This paper examines what accelerating sea-level rise means for that framework. It traces the physical drivers of sea-level change, distinguishing global mean rise from local relative change produced by subsidence, sedimentation, tectonic activity and coastal morphology, and sets out the environmental, economic and human consequences, including displacement from low-lying States and the gap in international protection that leaves climate migrants outside existing refugee law. It then turns to the questions that matter most for the law of the sea: whether retreating coastlines and disappearing reef features unsettle baselines, maritime zones and statehood itself. The paper argues that the decisive distinction is between baselines and established boundaries. Baselines follow physical geography; boundaries fixed by agreement or adjudication do not, and the Bay of Bengal arbitration supports their stability. Reconciling physical change with legal certainty is the central task for maritime governance.

This article examines whether Indian law has genuinely transformed marriage from a status-based institution protected by domestic privacy into a relationship governed by constitutional equality and public accountability. It adopts a doctrinal and analytical method, reading the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005 alongside the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 and leading constitutional and matrimonial decisions. The article develops an “accountability gap” thesis: Indian law now regulates a wide range of physical, emotional, sexual, and economic harms within domestic relationships, but continues to preserve status privileges where regulation would unsettle the legal meaning of marriage itself. Judicial decisions expanding the concepts of respondent, shared household, and domestic relationship have strengthened access to civil protection. At the same time, safeguards against unnecessary arrest have sometimes been absorbed into a broader misuse narrative that can obscure under-reporting and weak implementation. The clearest contradiction is that sexual abuse is actionable under civil domestic-violence law while forced sexual intercourse by a husband remains excluded from the general rape offence when the wife is an adult. The article argues that this inconsistency cannot be justified by marital privacy, evidentiary difficulty, or the availability of lesser remedies. It concludes that reform should preserve fair procedure while eliminating status-based immunity, strengthening implementation under the 2005 Act, and defining protection by vulnerability and coercive control rather than conformity to an idealized form of marriage.

Digital contracting has made contractual assent almost frictionless. Consumers routinely enter into contractual relationships by clicking 'I Agree' to standard-form terms that may contain extensive provisions concerning liability, dispute resolution, automatic renewal, intellectual property, indemnification and termination. Contract law, however, generally does not require proof that a contracting party actually read or understood every contractual provision before becoming bound. This creates a persistent tension between the formal manifestation of assent and the informational circumstances in which that assent is obtained. This article examines that tension through the concept of the 'assent-comprehension gap', the distance between the legal significance attributed to an affirmative act of acceptance and the extent to which the contracting party could reasonably appreciate the consequences of that act. It argues that the solution lies neither in requiring actual comprehension nor in treating a single click as equally meaningful for every term in a standard-form agreement. Instead, it proposes a graduated model of meaningful assent, under which the procedural conditions surrounding acceptance become increasingly important as the materiality and consequences of a term increase. The article situates this proposal within Indian contract law and consumer protection law, considering the recognition of electronic contracting under the Information Technology Act, 2000. It engages with Robert A. Hillman's analysis of Internet standard-form contracts in India and the broader 'no-reading problem' literature, and draws on comparative clickwrap and browsewrap jurisprudence to illustrate how courts have approached the relationship between notice and affirmative assent. Building on this analysis, the article develops a five-factor framework based on materiality, prominence, complexity, consequence and transactional context, and concludes that this framework can preserve contractual certainty while preventing the act of clicking 'I Agree' from becoming detached from the significance of the obligations it is taken to create.

The rapid digitisation of economic, social and governmental activities has transformed the nature of criminality and created new challenges for contemporary criminal justice systems. India, as one of the world’s largest digital economies, has experienced a substantial expansion of cybercrime, ranging from identity theft, online cheating and cyberstalking to ransomware, financial fraud, deepfakes and other technology-enabled offences. The National Crime Records Bureau’s Crime in India 2024 indicates a significant increase in registered cybercrime cases, demonstrating the growing importance of an effective legal and institutional response. Against this background, this paper examines India’s cybercrime regulatory framework through a doctrinal and comparative legal methodology. It analyses the Information Technology Act, 2000, the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023, the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023, the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, 2023, and related regulatory mechanisms. Particular attention is given to jurisdiction, electronic evidence, attribution of criminal responsibility, intermediary responsibility, cross-border investigation and emerging technology-enabled offences. The study further compares India’s approach with selected international frameworks, particularly the Budapest Convention on Cybercrime and the regulatory approaches adopted by the European Union, the United Kingdom and the United States. The paper argues that India’s principal difficulty is not the complete absence of cybercrime legislation but the fragmentation of applicable legal provisions across substantive, procedural and regulatory instruments. It concludes that an effective response requires greater doctrinal coherence, specialised investigative capacity, improved electronic-evidence procedures, strengthened international cooperation and a technologically neutral legal framework capable of addressing emerging forms of cybercrime without unnecessarily restricting legitimate digital activity.

Section 69 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 (“BNS”) constitutes a significant legislative intervention in the criminal regulation of sexual intercourse procured through deception or a false promise of marriage made without an intention to fulfil it, where the conduct does not amount to rape. The provision seeks to address a doctrinal gap that emerged under the erstwhile legal framework by recognising deceptive sexual exploitation as a distinct form of criminality. This article examines the evolution of judicial principles concerning false promises of marriage and analyses their statutory incorporation under Section 69. It focuses particularly on the requirements of dishonest intention at the inception of the promise, the causal nexus between deception and sexual consent, and the evidentiary difficulties involved in retrospectively establishing mens rea. The article further evaluates the scope of the expression “deceitful means”, including deception relating to employment, promotion, identity, and marital status, and considers the potential for overbreadth and inconsistent judicial application. It also examines the relationship between Section 69 and the provisions governing consent vitiated by fear or misconception and the statutory definition of rape. Particular attention is given to questions of consent, sexual autonomy, gender equality, privacy, evidentiary uncertainty, potential misuse, and proportionality. The article argues that Section 69 should be interpreted through a precise, culpability-oriented and evidence-based framework, distinguishing deliberate fraudulent inducement from the subsequent failure of a genuine promise. It concludes that effective application of the provision requires a careful balance between protecting sexual autonomy and preventing the unwarranted criminalisation of consensual relationships that subsequently fail.

Carbon markets have become one of the principal market-based responses of international environmental law to climate change, because they allow emission reductions to be priced, traded and counted across borders. The Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement, particularly Article 6 of the latter, institutionalised carbon trading on a global scale, with the aim of securing cost-effective mitigation while supporting sustainable development. Their implementation, however, has raised persistent legal and regulatory difficulties. Weak transparency, uneven monitoring and verification, the double counting of reductions and the absence of effective enforcement have all diminished their practical value. The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) in particular has been criticised for inefficiency, poor environmental integrity and inadequate regulatory supervision. A study prepared for the European Commission concluded that eighty-five per cent of the projects it surveyed had a low likelihood of ensuring that reductions were additional and were not over-estimated. This study evaluates the effectiveness of the international legal frameworks governing carbon markets, examines how those frameworks attempt to reconcile economic efficiency with environmental protection, and considers how problems such as phantom credits and over-crediting bear on the legitimacy of carbon markets. It seeks to identify the structural and regulatory shortcomings of the present regime and to argue for greater legal consistency, sharper accountability and stronger enforcement.

This article explores how increasingly accessible, flexible, and easier education has undermined the overall academic culture globally. It highlights several pitfalls of easier education, often masquerading as accessible and flexible education, that have devalued credentials and have had serious ramifications for those who truly are diligent and strive for excellence. It also highlights the illusion of equality thus created and provides directions for balancing accessibility with excellence.

The debate surrounding the Uniform Civil Code (UCC) in India raises important questions about equality, secularism, individual rights and the protection of cultural diversity. Although Article 44 of the Constitution directs the State to endeavour towards securing a common civil code for citizens, the idea of uniformity becomes complicated in a country where different communities follow diverse personal laws and customary practices. This study examines the jurisprudential tension between constitutional morality and cultural autonomy under the UCC, with particular reference to Assam and a comparative analysis of Uttarakhand and Gujarat. The main objective of the study is to examine whether constitutional values such as equality, dignity, individual autonomy and non-discrimination can be promoted through a uniform civil framework without unnecessarily restricting legitimate cultural and customary practices. It also seeks to identify the similarities, differences and challenges in the approaches adopted by the three states. The study follows a doctrinal and comparative methodology. It draws upon constitutional provisions, relevant legislation, judicial decisions, government documents and existing academic literature relating to personal laws, secularism, cultural rights and the UCC. The experiences of Uttarakhand and Gujarat are examined comparatively to understand the practical and constitutional issues that may arise while moving towards greater uniformity in civil laws. The study argues that uniformity should not be understood merely as the imposition of identical rules on communities with different social and cultural backgrounds. At the same time, cultural autonomy cannot be used to justify practices that violate fundamental rights or principles of equality and dignity. The paper therefore explores whether constitutional morality can provide a balanced approach by protecting individual rights while respecting legitimate cultural differences. It concludes that a workable UCC should promote equality and justice without disregarding India’s pluralistic constitutional identity.

‘Ecocide’ was first used by Professor Arthur W. Galston in 1970 at the Conference on War and National Responsibility, to describe the effects of ‘Agent Orange’, a defoliant chemical. Some 80 million litres were sprayed over 2.6 million hectares of forest during the Vietnam War, causing utmost devastation to human and ecological life, the consequences of which are still felt by generations in Vietnam shaped by that historical exposure. Unlike Agent Orange, where the impact on human and ecological life was intentional during war and localised, ecocide presents itself in various forms, with tendencies of negligence, multinational effects, occurring during peacetime or standard corporate and State practices. The international legal system glaringly lacks an adequate framework to tackle this widespread destruction. Globally, climate change is already crossing multiple tipping points, which would lead to humanity facing a “potentially catastrophic, irreversible outcome”. International environmental law currently relies on soft law, entailing non-legally binding provisions. Various treaties, such as the Paris Agreement, depend on voluntary member cooperation, and on State responsibility providing reparations and compensation. Moreover, the Rome Statute, the fundamental treaty governing the International Criminal Court, addresses environmental harm merely when it is caused by or during armed conflict, thereby neglecting ecocide and devastation caused by factors such as deforestation, oil spills, hydraulic fracturing, water and soil contamination, and industrial pollution. This study argues that the criminalisation of ecocide is essential for addressing the needs of present and future generations, regardless of the challenges such an action may pose.

In 2010, critiques of India’s online surveillance regime rested on unstable doctrinal ground: privacy was, at best, a contested emanation of Article 21, and the procedural safeguards attached to interception under Section 69 of the Information Technology Act, 2000 existed without any independent authorisation requirement or a companion statute governing how gathered data could be processed. This article asks whether two intervening developments, the recognition of privacy as a fundamental right in Justice K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India and the enactment of the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, have actually corrected the specific structural defect that animated the earlier critique, namely the absence of any check on the executive’s own decision to intercept, prior to interception taking place. Tracing the doctrinal arc from Puttaswamy’s proportionality standard through the Pegasus spyware litigation to the DPDP Act’s exemption for state processing, this article argues that the constitutional and statutory landscape has been transformed while the operative architecture of Section 69 itself, an executive order followed only by a post-facto, non-judicial review committee, has remained essentially unchanged since 2009. Drawing a comparison with the judicial pre-authorisation, or “double lock”, mechanism under the United Kingdom’s Investigatory Powers Act, 2016, including its own recent narrowing, the article proposes a calibrated form of prior judicial authorisation for Section 69 interception orders as the specific reform needed to close the gap between India’s proportionality doctrine and its surveillance practice.

Discussion of dark patterns in India has largely asked whether any single statute, competition, consumer protection, or data protection law, is doctrinally equipped to capture manipulative interface design. This article argues that a prior, structural question now matters more: once at least three regulators, the Competition Commission of India (prospectively empowered under the Draft Digital Competition Bill, 2024), the Central Consumer Protection Authority under its 2023 Guidelines for Prevention and Regulation of Dark Patterns, and the Data Protection Board of India under the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, each possess an independent and overlapping legal basis to act against the same interface, no mechanism exists to determine which regulator decides first, on what evidentiary basis, or with what effect on the others. Drawing on the Competition Commission’s own experience in the Google Android and Play Store proceedings, where the National Company Law Appellate Tribunal struck down several design-mandating remedies as exceeding the legal basis available under an ex-post finding of abuse of dominance, and on the Consumer Protection Authority’s 2023 Guidelines, which expressly acknowledge but do not resolve their overlap with other laws, this article shows that fragmentation is not a speculative risk but an observable feature of India’s current enforcement landscape. It compares two international responses, the United Kingdom’s fused single-regulator model under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act, 2024 and the European Union’s managed-separation model under the Digital Markets Act, and finds that even the EU’s explicit statutory relationship clause has not prevented national authorities from reaching Digital Markets Act-scoped conduct through the backdoor of consumer protection law. The article proposes a notification, primary-characterisation, and shared-evidentiary-registry framework for India, designed to prevent this specific failure mode without requiring the wholesale institutional consolidation that a fully fused model would demand.

India’s rapid transition to digital banking, mobile wallets, payment cards and the Unified Payments Interface has expanded financial inclusion while creating new opportunities for online financial fraud. This paper examines the principal forms of online financial fraud in India and evaluates whether the existing criminal, procedural, evidentiary, regulatory and consumer-protection framework can deliver timely prevention, investigation and victim redress. It adopts a doctrinal and qualitative analytical method, supported by criminological perspectives including routine activity, rational choice, differential association and victimology. The analysis covers phishing, vishing, smishing, UPI fraud, identity theft, account takeover, investment and loan-app scams, digital-arrest schemes and mule-account networks. It finds that India has a broad but fragmented framework. Its effectiveness is reduced by delayed reporting, interstate jurisdictional barriers, uneven electronic-evidence practices, weak coordination among institutions and uncertainty concerning fraudulently induced authorised payments. The paper argues for an authorised push-payment framework, rapid fund interception through 1930 and the National Cyber Crime Reporting Portal, continuous mule-account monitoring, proportionate account-freezing procedures, stronger platform and telecom cooperation, specialised investigation, and meaningful restitution. Effective control requires a coordinated model that treats fraud prevention, digital evidence, institutional accountability and victim protection as parts of one legal system.

Article 51 of the United Nations Charter recognises the inherent right of a state to defend itself, or another state, when force is used against it and retaliation becomes inevitable. It is at that point that the Security Council’s role becomes central: a state must report its exercise of self-defence to the Council, which the Charter intends to be the final arbiter of collective security. Contemporary developments present a tapestry of events that exposes a flaw in the structure of international law itself: the US raids on Iranian nuclear facilities, the 2026 Iran war and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, the arrest of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, the continuing impasse over Gaza and Ukraine, and the emergence of a potential rival “Board of Peace” mechanism. The law might be thought to have become invisible, but it has not. The International Court of Justice’s unanimous advisory opinion on climate obligations and the near-global Pandemic Agreement show that the fracture in compliance with international law appears where matters of great-power consent or veto are involved. Normative, trade and institutional activity remains largely, though not always, resilient to this. Relying on Security Council records, the Article 51 correspondence on Iran, commentary on the Venezuela operation and recent developments in the ICJ, the WHO and energy security, the paper argues that international law survives by selectivity, and that its coercive authority has become a matter of great-power discretion precisely where the Charter intended it to be least discretionary.

Social media has become one of the most powerful forces shaping public opinion and collective action in India today, capable of turning localised grievances into nationwide movements within days. This paper examines that phenomenon through the lens of a recent student-led protest, beginning with an overview of how social media platforms operate, how algorithms determine visibility, and how these mechanisms influence public discourse more broadly. It then traces the trajectory of the protest itself, examining how it escalated from a localised concern into a nationwide movement, and the extent to which paid promotional content and coordinated influencer networks contributed to this rapid amplification. This section also discusses the broader controversy involving Meta during this period, including the temporary removal of an official government video, the parliamentary scrutiny that followed, and the eventual personal apology issued by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, an episode that highlighted the significant influence social media platforms wield over political discourse and the accountability questions this raises. The paper then shifts to the legal dimension, finding that while India has a disclosure framework for paid commercial and monetised endorsements under the Consumer Protection Act, 2019, the CCPA Guidelines, and the ASCI Code, no comparable disclosure requirement exists for paid or coordinated amplification of protest-related content specifically, leaving this category of political communication largely unregulated. Building on this identified gap, the paper puts forward regulatory suggestions intended to address it, while remaining carefully attentive to the constitutional right to protest, ensuring that any proposed measures target deceptive amplification practices without curbing the sanctity and legitimacy of genuine dissent. The paper concludes by consolidating these findings and reflecting on their broader implications for the regulation of digital political communication in India.