Minority is well established as a form of legal incapacity across jurisdictions and laws. Some countries grant minors with limited capacity to contract while others consider all minors’ contracts to be void. These rules were laid down in the pre-digital age. Minors today are entering into more and varied transactions than the generations before them, be it shopping on e-retail websites, creating social media accounts, or the more traditional employment contracts. This paper examines how the three jurisdictions of England, India and South Africa deal with minor contracts in the digital age. While South Africa permits minors above the age of seven years to enter into contracts with parental assistance, the English and Indian position is that minor contracts are unenforceable against minors, unless they are ‘contracts for necessaries’ or contracts for the benefit of the minor. Judicial interpretation of these categories has been fluid and indeterminate, creating its own set of problems. This paper argues from the Indian standpoint that the current understanding is inadequate to address the issues that will arise from the mismatch between law (where minority is almost synonymous with incapacity) and reality (where minors are increasingly entering into contracts). The author suggests that the definition for minority for contractual liability should be graded after the model of criminal liability and demonstrates that there are some, albeit imperfect, gains to be had from the South African system.
Building an ethos of trust and respect is a key factor in the success of engaging early career researchers (ECRs) in editorial teams.• Regular meetings and open communication ensure accountability and sharing of responsibilities.• Nurturing and sustaining an ethic of collaboration with senior editors mentoring junior ones ensures a strong allegiance and sense of responsibility to the journal.• Being part of a journal editorial group can help build community and solidarity with other researchers which may not be so easily achieved within academia.• Real-time engagement, whilst beneficial to the journal and to authors, may be too onerous for ECRs and separation of work and personal life should be maintained.
Santa and Banta jokes are the mainstay of most Indian childhoods. Santa and Banta were used as stage names by the comedian duo Gurprit and Prabhpreet Singh but somewhere along the line, they turned into fictional characters in their own right and acquired pan-Indian fame. The defining characteristics of Santa and Banta jokes are that both are simple-minded middle-aged men belonging to the Sikh religious community. Most Indians consider these jokes lame but many Sikhs find them to be offensive and demeaning, not because of what is said but because of who says it. In 2015, Harvinder Chowdhury, a Sikh lawyer, petitioned the Supreme Court of India to ban the online dissemination of the Santa and Banta jokes. The Court admitted the Public Interest Litigation (PIL) petition and constituted a committee to look into this matter, before ultimately dismissing the petition in 2017, without judging it on merits. This paper will examine this specific attempt of the Indian judiciary to regulate humor, within the broader context of freedom to religion and free speech. It will study the arguments raised in the PIL, the recommendations of the committee, and the observations of the Court. No study has been done of the relationship between law and humor in India. This paper will examine whether the Court missed an opportunity to contribute to the virtually non-existent humor jurisprudence in India. Last year a children’s book The Art of Tying a Pug was withdrawn by its publishers because of the backlash it faced from the Sikh community on the wordplay in its title, which referred to the dog breed and the turban (pag or pagdi) worn by Sikhs. This incident is illustrative of the chilling effect on humor publications and the current publishers’ strategy of withdrawing the material deemed offensive instead of submitting it for judicial determination. Could a decision on merits in the Santa and Banta jokes case have laid down guidelines on what was acceptable and what was offensive? What would such guidelines be? Is the laying down of guidelines even possible, or desirable, given the unique set of issues presented by humor for the law? Ethnic jokes, in the form of minority-majority community jokes, are found in cultures all over the world. This paper will also undertake a comparative analysis of ethnic jokes in an attempt to answer these questions.
One popular understanding of the Indian Constitution is that it is a living document that evolves with time. Even though this metaphor has been used consistently by all three branches of the Indian state, its use in Indian legal texts is underexplored—as of most metaphors generally. In this article, we critically evaluate the application of the living metaphor in Indian constitutional discourse. We first provide an overview of the use of metaphors generally, and especially in the legal field. We then identify the origins and trace the use of the living metaphor by studying select Supreme Court judgments which have likened the Constitution to a living text and analyse the Court’s reasons, if any, for doing so. A comparative analysis of how the Canadian, US, and Australian courts have employed the living metaphor demonstrates how the Indian experience differs in its application of the metaphor. We find that the Supreme Court has used different variants of the living metaphor, primarily to expand the ambit of Part III of the Constitution. However, due to the inconsistent and unreliable use of this metaphor, we find that this has the potential to lead to illiberal results. We thus make a case for the formulation of a doctrine of living constitutionalism which we think will be more resilient to anti-democratic challenges.
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