Abstract This article argues that contemporary Indian law is animated by two intertwined imaginings of law: as a rational, rule-bound process and as a power that makes decisions as a normless act of prerogative. Through ethnographic fieldwork in Delhi’s terrorism courts, the paper examines petitions written by individuals accused under anti-terror laws, revealing how these texts invoke the dual legal imaginaries. Petitions—ranging from formal legal documents to handwritten pleas—are analysed through the idea of epistolarity, to pay attention to both the form and content of these petitions. The article argues that these letters are affective and rhetorical performances that simultaneously invoke imaginings of the law as both rule and prerogative. In doing so, the subjectivity of the petitioners oscillates between rights-bearing citizens and humble supplicants praying for the law’s intervention.

Abstract This article examines systemic rivalry between Indonesian criminal justice agencies, highlighting the inherent conflicts that arise when institutional actors with distinct values and priorities interact. It argues that analysing these conflicts reveals underlying power dynamics that hinder the system’s effectiveness. Indonesia serves as a compelling case study for analysing inter-agency conflict, where the source of conflict transcends procedural differences and stems from a power struggle driven by institutional self-preservation. Utilizing interviews, court decisions, media reports, and legislative analysis, this article delves into the power struggle between the police, prosecutors, and the anti-corruption agency (KPK). The analysis reveals the police to be at the centre of this conflict, resisting reforms that threaten their institutional survival. This article then argues that substantial reform of Indonesia’s criminal justice system would be difficult to achieve, as such rivalry is driven by patronage politics both within and outside the institution.

Modernity has been the idée fixe of law and society scholarship from the very beginning. It is impossible to imagine our field without its roots in the rather different theories of Weber, Marx, and Durkheim about the defining characteristics of a modern legal system; and their theories still resonate in the work of 21st-century researchers. Moreover, pre-modern law and post-modern law, as their names suggest, are also defined and analysed by law and society scholars in relation to the central concept of modernity. Modernity and its pre- and post-incarnations are the very bedrock of the law and society field.

Abstract This study examines how Egyptian law recognizes and deals with land that is stipulated as state property, but has been informally used and/or acquired by individuals as private property. A case in point is Warraq Island in Egypt, whose land became the target of the government’s initiative to remove illegal occupations on the so-called state-owned land. In July 2017, government forces arrived on the island to enforce the order, but they encountered fierce resistance from the residents. Since then, both parties have been involved in negotiations to agree on a viable solution. It is important to note that in Egypt, the state often exerts control over the legal system, based on its own interests. However, such actions tend to fail in light of legal challenges by various actors or widespread demonstrations that may not be legally sanctioned.

Abstract This paper purports to identify the origin of farmland disputes in Myanmar triggered by the 2012 land law reform, and the attitudes of mediators. While 120 interviewed farmers showed a strong perception of the traditional right of farming to their ancestral land Bobwapaingmyae, the land administrators believe such a traditional right was lost with the formal registration of “cultivation right.” To fill such a perception gap, village mediators apply a legal pluralist view that both rights can exist in parallel. Once, however, a farmer separates his “cultivation right” from Bobwapaingmyae and places it in the market through sales or mortgages, the disputes come under the formal system where legal positivism governs. But the authors found the tendency of formal forums which affirm the claims of Bobwapaingmyae lacking the registration upon the proof of “actual cultivation,” revealing a legal postulate that sustains the substantive value of livelihood protection upon a condition of formalistic appearance of the asserted right, as a compromise between plural legal regimes.

Abstract Introduction to the Special Issue on Property Rights in India: Theory and Practice.

Abstract This article tries to understand the role of the idol as a juristic person in the Ram Janmabhumi judgment that resolved the issue of title, following from the Ayodhya dispute. I trace the link between the establishment of the idol as a juristic being and the governance of Hindu property, highlighting the point that an award of personhood to the idol is an award of rights to the community behind the idol. The details of the Ram Janmabhumi judgment show that juridically empowering the community behind the idol in an inter-community conflict has a different texture from an intra-community dispute. The implications of this are explored—first by understanding the nature of the rights created and the conflicts they generate (following the Italian jurist Sforza), and second by understanding this configuration of property rights as a positional good, positional goods being paramount in the production of an economy geared to ethno-nationalism.

Abstract Women and Property inheritance is a complex issue in India. The Hindu Succession Laws give women inheritance rights on ancestral, acquired, and agricultural land. This has led to an increase in their bargaining power and a consequential increase in transaction costs, which ideally should challenge the ex-ante and ex-post HSAA 2005, Coasean cooperative equilibriums. While the normative Coasean theorem propounds the dismantling of cooperation with the rise in bargaining, the Hobbesian framework believes that cooperation can exist through coercion. This process, in which women have bargaining rights yet cooperate, happens through “covert coercion.” Despite increased bargaining powers, women are conflicted between inheritance and maintaining familial ties, where covert coercion forces them to let go of inheritance. The article investigates this conflict women face through the lens of Law, normative Coasean and Hobbesian frameworks, psychological costs, and their Lived Reality. Further, this article investigates various efficiency criteria.

Abstract There are several examples of collective action/social movements for the environmental cause in India. The literature on environmental governance and environmental economics, identifies a significant role of the nature of environmental goods with respect to the twin classifying criteria of rivalry in consumption and excludability. The common pool resource and public good nature of environmental property require varied governance approaches. These economic theory-based classifications can be associated with diverse types of property rights regimes in the legal realm. By developing an analytic narrative, this article attempts to identify how common individuals related with environmental movements, identify some of these nuances with respect to nature of environmental goods and associated property rights regimes and develop strategies for improvements. This article utilises secondary qualitative data to examine the perspective of common individuals, groups, and leaders of environmental movements to infer theoretical learnings from a few cases in India.

Abstract This article examines interactions facilitated by legal pluralism in contemporary urban India. Employing a framework of semi-autonomous social fields, I focus on use rights exercised over “Waqf” properties and the role social fields so generated play in facilitating access to property rights for groups without social and economic capital. Viewing property through a relational lens and relying on the method of examining “trouble” disputes, I discuss two long-term disputes in a Sufi shrine of an urban village called Mehrauli, Delhi. I will advance two main arguments in the article. First, the operation of formal and informal legal orders forms a generative ground making access to resources more equitable. Second, formal and informal legal orders interact to form a dialectical relationship, such that it becomes difficult to tell which of the two is superior.