Volume-IV (2021)

Chief Justice, High Court of Himachal Pradesh

Chancellor, HPNLU Shimla

Prof. Nishtha Jaswal

Vice Chancellor, HPNLU Shimla

Chanchal Kumar Singh

Associate Professor of Law, HPNLU Shimla

From the Editor’s Desk

Writing is an act of great responsibility, a therapeutic act, to cure the repressive and sublimated reality of current believes and texts.  Giorgio Agamben poetically calls it, ‘an art which shines in its non-revealing potential’, a gesture to, restrict certain exposition, to create. Writing, with its creativity, has potential to destroy the fundamental presuppositions upon which a proposition is claimed to be valid.

Publishing a Law Review, in a democratic society, is just like an act of diagnosis without which no treatment can begin. Democracy is not just an institution, established once upon a time, which is being carried on in its primal form, substance, and function. It is contextual vis-à-vis history and society, evolution, and culture etc. Democracy cannot be eternally institutionalized: it has to be temporally nourished by critiquing its deviances and making its inconsistencies-incoherencies aware of itself. Publishing a Law Review, consisting of logically crafted essays supported by right evidences with an objective of guiding the institutional and attitudinal progress, in a proper direction, is an act of great responsibility, which we are trying to shoulder year after year.

Shimla Law Review was founded to break the shackles perpetuated in legal-scholarship, in India, in recent few decades, viz. practices to analyze the written texts of law and the court’s judgments on them, without going outside law to understand its origination, growth, validity, functions and moral claims. It was ‘positivist-curse’ from which Common Law Legal Scholarship was suffering but its endurance has been thinned with the progress of functionalist approach of law developed by sociological-jurists. Historical school of thought exposed the metaphysics of law, as an alternative scholarship, historical analysis of law, legal system and its organization, evolution and regression, challenges the mechanistic obedience to legal texts and its reasoning developed in judgments after judgments. In contemporary context, legal scholarship has explored its path in multi-disciplinarity. And Shimla Law Review is trying to expand the horizons of legal scholarship, liberating it from the circularity of text, meaning, and reference.

The fourth volume of the Review contains multiple themes of scholarly exploration, which are relevant for the contemporary world. Some of the themes include; Genealogical and Analytical Critique of New Education Policy, Paradoxes of the Constitution in Authoritarian Regimes, Decolonizing International Law Teaching, Cyber-Warfare, Constitutional Morality, Secularism, Surrogacy, Criminalization of Politics in India, etc.

Shimla Law Review is an open access law journal, which aims to facilitate the legal discourse without any hindrance to access based upon the monetization of all values and market’s principle of demand and supply. In our age, act of revolution is not about warfare and positioning as a class against each-other. Rather, it is a ‘militant scholarship’, which breaks the pyramid of pre-suppositions, dogmatism, and the Western academic habitude and helps to create a more just and fairer world.

The papers published in previous volumes, of the Law Review, have received accolade from academicians at home and abroad, bar & bench alike. Papers published in Shimla Law Review has been chosen as one of the best fifty-one papers published in English, under peer reviewed journals from across the world, in the decade, 2010-2020, by Cross Examination Debate Association, the United States.  Some of the papers published in its previous Volumes have found place amongst the most downloaded papers in the category of ‘jurisprudence and theoretical inquiry’, from the SSRN database.

We look forward to more quality-global discourses in the future volumes of the Review. I am confident that the papers published in the present Volume would add to the existing debate in a more constructive manner while also paving the way for further debate and research.

 Sd/-

Editor-in-Chief

Prof. Nishtha Jaswal

Vice Chancellor

Himachal Pradesh National Law University, Shimla

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Vice Chancellor, Himachal Pradesh National Law University, Shimla

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Disclaimer

The views expressed in the Shimla Law Review are those of the contributors. The editors and the HPNLU, Shimla do not control nor necessarily subscribe or endorse the views expressed by respective contributors. The editors and HPNLU, Shimla disown all liability and responsibility for any error, misprint and infringement of any right of other by printing any contribution in the Review.

MODE OF CITATION:IV SML. L. REV. <pg. no.> (2021)

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Editor

Shimla Law Review

Himachal Pradesh National Law University, Shimla

16 Mile, Shimla-Mandi National Highway, Ghandal, District Shimla
Himachal Pradesh- 171014. (India)

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