When a Law Student Wrote the Most Important Paper of the Decade; Bar Judges; and Other Stories
This week we discuss one of the most important paper of the decade; "Bar Judges"; how to see the Kunal Kamra issue; what copyright traps are; and a short story on the Constitution.
When a Law Student Wrote The Most Important Paper of the Decade
When people think of research work or working in academia, a question that looms at large is- how much would the work actually impact the ‘real’ world? Well, in some cases the impact is more than what we would imagine.
Lina Khan, while she was a student at Yale Law School, wrote a paper for the university’s law review. The 90-page long paper, published in 2017, was titled ‘Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox.‘ Her work has been considered as one of the most important papers written in the field of competition law, which has re-framed decades-long conception of the law.
Read more about the paper here.
Lawyers Who Have Been Directly Elevated to the Supreme Court
The appointment of judges has always been a hotly contested issue. Did you know that those who get elevated directly from their legal practice are referred to as ‘Bar Judges’?
Did you know that India has had only 8 Bar Judges appointed to the Supreme Court, and only one of them has been a woman?
There are interesting stories surrounding their appointments. For instance, the first Bar Judge to the SC, S.M. Sikri had a strained relationship with the ruling party. Yet he went on to become the CJI and ended up presiding over (arguably) India’s most important case, Keshavananda Bharti.
There was another judge (who continues to be in the SC today), who was appointed after 15 years of no Bar Judges. Do you know which judge we are talking about?
Read about them here.
A Dean’s Advice to Law Students on the Kunal Kamra Issue
Prof. Nuggehalli Nigam, the Dean of BML Munjal University, posted a series of tweets on the entire controversy surrounding the tweets by Kunal Kamra and subsequent filing of contempt charges by law students. We thought that it highlights some important points for all to consider and read, and form an opinion, no matter which side of the debate we weigh towards.
You can read them here.
Walking into a Copyright Trap and Discovering a Community of Learners
Did you know that there is something called a ‘copyright trap’? It is similar to a mousetrap. A block of cheese placed to lure you in, but the moment you take it. Snap. The trap closes on you.
Copyright traps, similarly, means when a publisher intentionally places wrong or fictitious information, so that if someone copies from them they can find out. Common examples are made-up cities and words in maps and dictionaries.
Did you know that a fictitious town on paper led to people actually creating a town by the same name?
This realization led the author, John Greene, to develop an insight into how we learn.
Read the post here.
The Indian Constitution as an Illusion
A lot has been written about the Indian Constitution, and its history and impact. We talk about an interesting passage from Rohit De’s phenomenal book, ‘A People’s Constitution’. Did you know that two-thirds of the Indian Constitution is the same as the Government of India Act 1935?
This has led to some touting that the new Constitution is an illusion.
A short story called ‘Naya Kanoon’ by the author Sadat Hasan Manto highlights this.
Read more about this here.
Fun fact: Did you know that in one of the obscenity cases against Manto, the judge was a fan of his work? Yet he still punished him, although with a small fine. Read the article to know more about this.
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