Articles
On Legal Aid
2021
Farzana Akter, The Standard of Assistance from Legal Aid Lawyers: An Indian Perspective, Indian Law Review
The article examines the standard of assistance provided by Indian legal aid lawyers in light of the international human rights normative framework. It argues that the system does not comply with the international human rights standards in terms of the quality of service delivered. It recommends measures to remedy the shortcomings of the Indian legal aid system in order to bring it in conformity with the international human rights standards and guarantee effective assistance from legal aid lawyers.
1966
G O Koppell, Notes and Comments: Legal Aid In India, Journal of the Indian Law Institute
The article provides an overview of the legal aid system in the country at the time, and outlines the constitutional basis of the right to legal aid. It also discusses the legal aid system in Britain and the United States, presenting recommendations for the introduction of a national legal aid system in India.
1975
Upendra Baxi, Legal Assistance to the Poor: A Critique of the Expert Committee Report, Economic & Political Weekly
This article critiques the National Expert Committee on Legal Aid, which was appointed to consider the question of making available legal advice and legal aid to the ‘weaker sections of the community’. It argues that the Committee’s approach to its task was ahistoric, aprioristic and aphoristic, avoiding careful formulation of the problem and ignores the limitation of resources to which the Committee’s terms of reference had pointedly referred. It posits that solicitude for the poor calls for hard-headed appraisal of social realities and sober formulation of feasible policies.
1976
Dinesh Khosla, Making Law Effective - Pre-Paid Group Legal Services as a Strategy, Journal of the Indian Law Institute
This article discusses the role of legal services in empowering individuals and protecting their rights, specifically arguing for a system of pre-paid group legal services as the mode of providing these services. This refers to a type of insurance, which members of a group contribute to, in order to protect themselves in case of a future legal contingency.
1986
Jagat Narain, Legal Aid - Litigational or Educational an Indian Experiment, Journal of the Indian Law Institute
This is a comment on the recommendations of the Committee for Implementing Legal Aid Schemes (CILAS), appointed by the Government of India in 1981, with Chairman Justice P. N. Bhagwati Chief Justice of India on the components of a preventive legal aid scheme, specifically on educating the poor about their legal rights and entitlements.
1988
N R Madhava Menon, Legal Aid and Justice for the Poor, in Upendra Baxi (ed), Law and Poverty: Critical Essays, N M Tripathi Pvt Ltd
This article examines the right to legal aid in the context of poverty alleviation, outlining the history, constitutional basis, and considerations for implementation of a legal aid scheme in India. It emphasises the importance of preventive legal aid and access to justice, also engaging with the scope of such a programme.
1990
Richard K Gordon Jr. and Jonathan M. Lindsay, Law and the Poor in Rural India: The Prospects for Legal Aid, American University International Law Review
This article engages with the implementation of legal aid in India, in the context of critiques of the imposition of Western models and of the failure of the right to legal aid to address injustice and domination. It engages specifically with the relationship between access to legal aid and addressing domination in society.
2018
Shruthi Naik, Manpower Malady: Managing Legal Aid Institutions, Daksh Approaches to Justice in India Report
In this chapter, the author examines the working of the legal services authorities in India against the backdrop of available judicial manpower, and reviews legal aid models followed internationally, in order to propose an alternative model that can aid the judiciary in managing the administration of legal aid efficiently. It specifically focuses on the balance to be struck, when optimising judicial time, between judicial functions, in light of the burgeoning caseload, and administrative responsibilities in legal aid institutions.
On Legal Aid and Criminal Justice
1968
R Prasannan, Counsel in the Criminal Process, Journal of the Indian Law Institute
This article discusses the importance of the right to counsel in criminal cases, examining the role that access to legal representation would play at different stages in the criminal proceeding including in the pretrial stage, in accessing bail, and in appeal.
1980
Kirpal Singh Chhabra, Legal Aid in Criminal Proceedings, Journal of the Indian Law Institute
This article critiques the failure of the state to provide an adequate scheme for legal aid in criminal cases, highlighting the limitations of section 304 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973 and the poor remuneration paid to lawyers in existing schemes.
1985
P N Bhagwati, Human Rights in the Criminal Justice System, Journal of the Indian Law Institute
This article discusses the Supreme Court’s role in recognising rights to protect against the abuses in the criminal justice system, including the right to legal aid.
2006
K Murali, Andhra Pradesh: Institutional Apathy towards Undertrial Prisoners, Economic & Political Weekly
This article is based on a study by Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative on prison conditions in Andhra Pradesh that discusses the nature and extent of denial of legal assistance to prisoners, which ultimately resulted in overcrowding, unacceptable overstretching of facilities and consequent terrible conditions.
2016
Vijay Raghavan, Undertrial Prisoners in India - Long Wait for Justice, Economic & Political Weekly
The article is a comment on efforts to decongest prisons and reduce the undertrial prison population. It engages on three specific issues: the lack of quality legal aid services for undertrial prisoners; the financial system of bail and the delays in trial processes. It also criticises the criminalisation of poverty in our system.
2016
Murali Karnam and Trijeeb Nanda, Condition of Undertrials in India - Problems and Solutions, Economic & Political Weekly
A large number of the poor, the Dalits and people from the minority communities are languishing in jail as undertrials because of a property-based bail system and a poor legal aid mechanism. This article suggests ways in which both these tools could be strengthened for speedy dispensation of justice.
2019
Abhinav Sekhri, Dancing in the Dark: The Right to Effective Legal Assistance in India, Comparative Constitutional Law and Administrative Law Quarterly
This paper focuses on the contours of a criminal defendant's right to effective legal assistance, when raised during appeal after conviction. It demonstrates that the contours are extremely difficult to discern and there is an urgent need for clarity on core questions to help better regulate claims of ineffective assistance by defendants. Further, it also argues that this clarity must work towards making it easier for defendants to litigate such claims, reducing the many structural barriers that currently make it almost impossible for defendants to win, while also excluding key areas of legal assistance from any judicial scrutiny.
On Access to Justice and Alternative Forums
1991
Robert S Moog, Conflict and Compromise: The Politics of Lok Adalats in Varanasi District, Law & Society Review
Researchers use a variety of approaches in analysing dispute processing outside of adversarial court proceedings. Some emphasise disputant decision making, while others, who generally take a more critical view of these alternatives, approach dispute processing alternatives from the perspective of the state and its interests. This article uses a third approach which focuses on the political behaviour of actors involved in the organisation, administration, and staffing of these alternative mechanisms. The approach is applied to a relatively new alternative to adjudication in the courts in India, the Lok Adalat.
2004
Marc Galanter and Jayanth K. Krishnan, "Bread for the Poor": Access to Justice and the Rights of the Needy in India, Hastings Law Journal
This article focuses on Lok Adalats, examined under the rubric of an alternative, non-state justice system. Recounting the movement to establish village-based courts as a key method of enlarging public access to justice, the article traces how the concept of the Lok Adalat started gaining significant momentum. It presents findings from preliminary observations of several different types of Lok Adalats, concluding that the claim that this forum offers participants speedy, fair, and deliberative justice needs serious reconsideration.
2010
Menaka Guruswamy and Aditya Singh, Accessing Injustice: The Gram Nyayalayas Act 2008, Economic & Political Weekly
This article critiques the Gram Nyayalayas Act, 2008 that moves Indian citizens with small claims, who live in rural areas, out of the adversarial system with its procedural guarantees. As a statute with limited procedural guarantees to adjudicate allegedly small claims, including those that implicate a plethora of social welfare legislations, this Act compromises the promises of the Constitution.
2014
Jayanth K Krishnan et al., Grappling at the Grassroots: Access to Justice in India's Lower Tier, Articles by Maurer Faculty
This article provides an account based on extensive ethnographies of litigants, judges, lawyers, and courtroom personnel within multiple districts in Maharashtra, Gujarat, and Himachal Pradesh from 2010 to 2012. The findings illustrate a complex matrix of variables - including infrastructure, staffing, judicial training and legal awareness, costs and continuances, gender and caste discrimination, power imbalances, intimidation and corruption, miscellaneous delays, and challenges with specialized forums - that impact access to justice in the lower tier. The article argues that if the lower tier is empowered with greater resources and certain perverse aspects of the legal system can be reformed, it has vast potential to promote social change that advances the socioeconomic status of India's most disadvantaged groups.
2015
Shishir Bail, From Nyaya Panchayats to Gram Nyayalayas: The Indian State and Rural Justice, The Socio-Legal Review
This article compares two institutions: the Nyaya Panchayats, aimed at recreating an ‘indigenous’, panchayat based model of dispute resolution, which died out by the 1970s; and the Gram Nyayalayas, set up through the passage of the Gram Nyayalaya Act, This article examines whether the Gram Nyayalayas make the same mistakes as their ill-fated forebears, or whether they do in fact represent a new approach to the problem of access to justice for rural litigants in India. This analysis reveals the Gram Nyayalayas differ substantially from Nyaya Panchayats, and in fact share far more similarities with the formal court system than to any poorly specified ideas of indigenous dispute resolution.
2016
Aparna Chandra, Indian Judiciary and Access to Justice: An Appraisal of Approaches, in Narasappa & Vidyasagar (ed.), State of the Indian Judiciary, Eastern Book Company
The article aims to evaluate the judiciary’s role in facilitating access to justice. Drawing upon the Constitution of India, 1950 to understand the constitutional ideal of justice to which access is needed, it explores its implications for how the judiciary should - normatively - understand its role in facilitating access to justice. Based on these conceptual segments, it then evaluates trends and approaches in judicial reform aimed at facilitating access, to understand the extent to which they meet, or fall short of, the constitutional conception of access to justice.