Document Type

Book Review

Publication Date

1985

Abstract

American legal scholars have devoted surprisingly little effort to studying India. In India, as in America, judges, lawyers, and legislators have had to shape a transplanted legal system with English roots. Both countries have adapted English legal institutions to conditions far more heterogeneous – ethnically, racially, linguistically,and geographically – than those of the mother country. It thus seems no accident that India's constitutional structure parallels that of the United States in so many ways. For example, India has a written constitution that embodies principles of federalism and separation of powers, and that provides for judicially enforced guarantees of individual rights. Indeed, nowhere else in the world does the judiciary play so central a political role as it does in the United States and India.

Disciplines

Civil Rights and Discrimination | Comparative and Foreign Law | Law

Comments

Competing Equalities: Law and the Backward Classes in India by Marc Galanter, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984, pp. xxii, 625, $36.50.

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