This article argues that the colonial government in India was shaped by changes in property law, race relations and other institutional interests that accompanied the political and economic restructuring of the colonial state. Therefore, the development of constitutionalism was the outcome of an interplay between institutional and professional interests and larger socio-economic and political forces. Against the backdrop of empire, constitutionalism in British India was defined by a specific form of allocation of powers between the executive (which also exercised legislative powers) and the high courts. The structure that developed as a result was a strong executive government, particularly in its exercise of power in local districts with formal judicial scrutiny introduced after 1861. The relationship between the executive and the judiciary in localities generated a series of conflicts and tensions, which were exacerbated by the expansion of the bureaucracy, the legal profession and gradual inclusion of Indians in the upper strata of governance. Taken together, these factors led to the development of a hybrid model of separation of powers in the Indian subcontinent, which seems to have stood the test of time in post-colonial countries of South Asia despite political elites having invested considerable resources on constitutional reform.

When people do not approach a formal court of law to settle their disputes, and cannot enter into out-of-court settlements either, what do they do? I find that people install court-like processes which mimetically follow the court procedures, executing the settlement as if the decision were rendered officially. By examining such practices in the case of divorce-related disputes in India, I advance a theory of legal apparitions, a phenomenon in which cosmetic mimicry of legal processes creates a new form of extra-legal resolution. This is likely to prevail in societies where access to justice is hindered due to socio-institutional factors and customary forms of adjudication are not possible (sometimes because of state law’s design). This idea can be used to explain a range of practices observed in South Asian societies, where people’s imagination of, and interaction with, legal apparatuses creates new forms of institutions.

Drawing primarily from qualitative interviews conducted between 2017 and 2018, this empirical study tells a granular story of how legal actors mobilised during the Lawyers’ Movement in Pakistan (2007–2009) from the perspective of lawyer-leaders who organised, steered and sustained support for the Movement through rapidly shifting political conditions. By underscoring the contribution of lawyer-leaders in empowering judges, the article seeks both to displace uncritical assumptions and arguments about courts as the nucleus of legal mobilisation in Pakistan, and to highlight the crucial role of political parties in the restoration of the judiciary against the backdrop of disintegrating lawyer-judge coalitions. Given Pakistan’s political context of a ‘hybrid regime’, the article reflects on the unsuitability of the ‘legal complex’ theory of ‘political liberalism’ for analysing and understanding the Movement, and locates it instead in the literature on legal mobilisation in authoritarian regimes.

Sri Lanka’s Constitution authorises the state to limit certain fundamental freedoms on the grounds of specific public interests. This article examines how this constitutional limitation regime has become vulnerable to majoritarian influence. It uses a case study approach, supplemented by key informant interviews, to delve into Sri Lanka’s constitutional practice with respect to limitations on fundamental freedoms such as the freedom of religion or belief, and the freedom of expression. The article illustrates how organs of the Sri Lankan state have equated notions of ‘public interest’ with the majority community’s conceptions of ‘security’, ‘order’, ‘health’ and ‘morals’. It argues that this practice reflects a cleavage between the moral legitimacy and the legal claimability of fundamental freedoms of minorities and satirists in Sri Lanka. It concludes that legal regimes designed to guarantee fundamental freedoms offer very little protection to minorities when the underlying politics driving the application of law is majoritarian.

The African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACtHPR) was finally established in 2004 after decades of negotiations. Despite forty years of resistance from governments who were reluctant to sacrifice sovereignty to a supranational body, the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights and its Protocol grant the ACtHPR far-reaching authority relative to other regional human rights courts. How did the ACtHPR end up with an expansive jurisdiction that is unprecedented among regional courts? This analysis proposes that legal experts’ ability to capture control over vital stages in the drafting of the African Charter and Protocol, thus limiting the influence of political advisors, yielded an institutional design that facilitated the ACtHPR's unique mandate. Furthermore, colonial legacies in newly-independent states pushed the founders of the African human rights system to envision an innovative, post-colonial human rights framework that integrated a wide-reaching spectrum of civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights.

In international human rights law, the right to food has become a widely accepted legal and normative framework for tackling the problem of food insecurity. However, as currently formulated, the right to food is insufficient as a framework to tackle gender-specific barriers that impede women's access to food, which has contributed to the persistence of women's food insecurity globally. While the equal enjoyment of the right to food is guaranteed by the non-discrimination and equality provisions in international law, this notion of equality, associated with the formal equality approach, fails to recognise and address women's historical experience of systemic discrimination. This article argues that women's food insecurity should be approached from a broader formulation of the right to food that is informed by a substantive equality perspective, drawing from contemporary interpretations and elucidations by human rights bodies which have pushed for a more substantive notion of equality.

In this work we analyse the way in which ideologies, understood as an extra-legal factor, are discursively manifested in a corpus of judicial rulings that resolve cases of Mapuche domestic violence. We understand the judicial ruling as an ideological discursive genre inherent to the legal field formed by social and discursive practices. By applying critical discourse analysis, we analyse the judicial discourse strategies used in order to construct (i) the idea of domestic violence in an indigenous context, (ii) the image of the Mapuche woman and (iii) the self-image of judges who resolve the conflict. We conclude that these strategies serve two purposes: one is to legitimate the law as an apparently impartial mechanism, and the other is to define the way those involved in the issue must be understood.

This article explores how complaint investigations undertaken by health ombudsman contribute to the improvement of the healthcare system. Using a qualitative case-study approach, semi-structured interviews were conducted with participants form the Scottish Public Services Ombudsman (SPSO) and three health boards within its jurisdiction. Health board participants were frustrated by complaints process used by the SPSO, in particular the lack of communication during an SPSO investigation especially when there were differences in clinical judgment. Using Braithwaite’s typologies of motivational postures and Hertogh’s models of administrative control it was found that a sense of capitulation was the primary determinant in ensuring health board compliance with SPSO recommendations and that the relationship between SPSO and health boards was predominantly coercive in nature. For the SPSO to be more effective in contributing to system improvement requires it to review its role and means of conducting complaint investigations.