Examines whether the Indian Supreme Court can produce progressive social change and improve the lives of the relatively disadvantaged.

These case studies examine the extent to which public interest litigation makes inefficient and often corrupt government officials responsible to the general public.

The State Practice of India and the Development of International Law by Bimal N. Patel provides a critical analysis of India’s state practice and development of international law. Providing insight into the historical evolution of Indian state practice from pre-1945 period through the 21st century, the work meticulously and systematically examines the interpretation and execution of international law by national legislative executive and judicial organs individually as well as collectively. The author demonstrates India’s ambitions as a rising global power and emerging role in shaping international affairs, and convincingly argues how India will continue to resist and prevent consolidation of Euro-American centric influence of international law in areas of her political, economic and culture influence.

This book explores how the liberal conception of justice with all its ideological underpinnings is reflected in the framing and working of the Constitution of India, in the adoption of broader socio-economic objectives, in the functioning of judicial and state institutions, and in the formulation and implementation of development strategy. It analyses the dynamics of the relationship between justice, democracy and the state. The book studies the liberal conception of social justice and its sufficiency, and interrogates its performance and adequacy within the structural parameters and cultural conditions of postcolonial India. It provides an analytical exposition of how the borrowed and inadequate conception of liberal justice and democracy inherited from colonial past, and the espousal of the derivative developmental pattern based on modernist and constructivist paradigm, have together failed to achieve the modest target of justice enshrined in the Constitution. Interlinking justice, democracy and state, the book examines their operational dynamics in an integrated framework which has relevance for other Third World countries also because of socio-economic and cultural commonalites.