The Phenomenon of Rainbow washing refers to the use by corporations of Pride symbols and other LGBTQ+ icons (usually during the month of June) for marketing purposes or as part of their Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) efforts, while still practicing the opposite of what they portray regarding LGBTQ+ rights through employee hiring practices, donations for political purposes, and other negative actions towards these communities. In examining this issue, the authors of this paper adopted both Business Ethics and HRM as theoretical frameworks through which to analyze the literature, conduct an analysis of secondhand or tertiary sources, and analyze CSR reports, investigative journalism, and advocacy organisation’s analysis of various companies or brands regarding Rainbow Washers. The research exposes three fundamental gaps: (a) there is a lack of an executable definition or guideline for authentic corporate LGBTQ+ allyship; (b) there is insufficient research on the link between the process of delivering signals of diversity in the workplace (i.e., through processes and/or policies) and mental wellbeing for employees; and (c) there is limited literature examining the intersection of queer advocacy through procurement/supplier-diversity processes and policies, and human resource management (HRM) policies related to LGBTQ+ employees. The research emphasizes the importance of filling these gaps because engage in performative allyship creates a lack of trust among stakeholders by undermining meaningful efforts toward equity, and represents an unethical action/inaction within multiple normative frameworks (e.g., stakeholder theory; social contract theory; virtue ethical theory). Additionally, the research synthesizes evidence from firms in the United States, UK, and India to provide a set of normative recommendations for an ethically based HRM policy regarding LGBTQ+ employees.[1]
[1]Michael Norton and Elizabeth Keenan, 'The Problem with Pride Month' (Harvard Business Review, 27 June 2019) <https://hbr.org/2019/06/the-problem-with-pride-month> accessed 20 July 2026.
#Rainbow Washing#Lgbtq+ Allyship#Corporate Social Responsibility (csr)
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One of the interesting risks of reading a book such as Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption is that you're not only reading a book about the book, you're reading a book about the bookwriter. The risk is that it may not disappoint, but that a reviewer, humored by the topic, will lapse into eulogy and never read the book as a book: as an argument, structure, a series of literary and rhetorical choices that do particular work. The temptation to eulogize its substance over its art would be a disservice to Bryan Stevenson's memoir, which is all three of these things. What follows is a vain attempt to follow both seriously.
The stakes of reading Just Mercy well are heightened by how far the book has travelled beyond the readers of legal memoirs. First published in 2014, it became a sustained bestseller and was adapted into a feature film released in 2019, carrying Stevenson's account of the McMillian case to audiences who would never otherwise encounter a work of legal non-fiction.[1]
[1] Encyclopaedia Britannica, 'Bryan Stevenson' (Britannica) <https://www.britannica.com/biography/Bryan-Stevenson> accessed 18 July 2026; 'Just Mercy and the Heartbreaking True Story of Walter McMillian' (E! News, 13 January 2020) <https://www.eonline.com/news/1110139/just-mercy-and-the-heartbreaking-true-story-of-walter-mcmillian> accessed 18 July 2026.
The rise of dupe culture has fundamentally changed how consumers think about luxury goods. In the context of social media, online shopping sites, and even online influencers, an entire new generation of consumers and merchants have embraced the basic concept that as long as a product does not feature a counterfeit logo or imitation packaging, but rather states that it was "inspired by" the original, then the product can be marketed without any issues. It is obvious. Contrary to fake products, dupes do not hide the fact that they are alternatives. Buyers are seldom in doubt that they are buying the original product. Transparency, therefore, is often assumed to place these products beyond the reach of trademark law.
However, the legal basis and origin of this assumption is quite precarious. Although the lack of deception will probably minimize the risk of trademark infringement, it cannot settle the question of trademark dilution, unfair competition, passing off, and using the reputation of the other brand. In other words, honesty about imitation is not always synonymous with legality. The legal response to such cases becomes highly complicated when companies use the identity, reputation and success of luxury brands in marketing products that replicate their commercial success and name but not the trademarks.
It has never been more clear than in the case of the booming dupe perfume market in India. Dupes are marketed with independent brand labels, but the goods are advertised as "inspired by" famous designer perfumes, providing customers with an olfactory experience at a fraction of the cost. This sector has become one of the most rapidly growing segments of the Indian personal care and beauty e- commerce industry operating on the Internet. However, despite the economic importance of the dupe business, no Indian court decision has ever analysed whether marketing of this kind constitutes trademark infringement, passing off, or some other unfair competitive activity. The lack of court cases has usually been treated as an informal approval of the practice. This Article argues that such a conclusion is misplaced.
In addition to not reflecting legal certainty, the absence of judicial pronouncements can be seen as the result of three structural features of Indian intellectual property laws working together at once. Firstly, the requirement for graphical representation in Section 2(1)(zb) of the Trade Marks Act, 1999 made it practically impossible to register scents as trademarks for decades, thus keeping the fragrances themselves out of the traditional trademark regime. Secondly, Section 13 of the Copyright Act, 1957 provides that unfixed sensory creation cannot be protected by copyright, preventing the fragrance compositions from having another means of intellectual property protection. Lastly, the law in India concerning comparison-advertising was formed on the basis of the law of commercial disparagement. The article traces the Trademark Registry’s unprecedented acceptance, in November 2025, Of India’s first olfactory trademark, filed by Sumitomo Rubber Industries for a rose fragrance applied to tyres, marks an important doctrinal development. However, the significance of this development for the perfumery industry is negligible. In essence, the trademarked scent is merely an arbitrary source identifier for tyres but not the very quality which the consumer seeks when buying a fragrance product. Therefore, the above registration has not helped to clarify the issue of whether the scent of a perfume product or marketing referencing it is capable of trademark protection.
Against this backdrop, this paper examines how Indian courts are likely to respond when confronted with the first major dispute involving dupe perfumes. It situates the issue within comparative jurisprudence, drawing on decisions such as Coty, Inc. v. Excell Brands, LLC in the United States and L'Oréal SA v. Bellure NV in the European Union, while analysing India's evolving jurisprudence on comparative advertising through cases including Reckitt & Colman, Pepsi Co. v. Hindustan Coca Cola, and Dabur India Ltd. v. Colgate Palmolive (India) Ltd. In light of these authorities, this article proposes a predictive model that would help determine whether or not the "inspired by" perfume marketing falls under the scope of legality in India. The paper concludes that despite the fact that the law is still uncertain in this regard, the remedies of passing off and infringement provided by Section 29(8) of the Trade Marks Act of 1999 constitute more plausible ways of protection than the current doctrine of commercial disparagement. It is in this context that the paper attempts to bridge a widening gap between the development of consumer markets and the legal system.
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The right of private defence in Indian criminal law is not a modern construct; it is a direct descendent of the Indian Penal Code 1860 drafted under Macaulay’s Law Commission, shaped and influenced by English Common Law assumptions about the violence and self defence in the mid nineteenth century. An act done in the exercise of Private defence is not an offence, provided sudden, visible danger by stranger, imminent threat to bodily harm, the utilization of reasonable force in reaction of that danger and absence of a safe opportunity to withdraw. Section 96 to 106 of the Indian Penal corresponding with Section 34 to 44 of Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 codified this logic This becomes far less clean and debatable in case of Battered Women Syndrome when the “stranger” is a husband and the danger has been present for years rather than seconds where it describes a psychological reality shaped by cumulative, cyclic trauma ,one in which a woman's perception of danger is calibrated not to the moment of attack but to a pattern learned overs years of abuse and mental, physical trauma for women.
Empirical data underscore the scale of this doctrinal blind spot: the National Family Health Survey (2019–21) found that more than one in four Indian women aged eighteen to forty-nine has experienced some form of domestic violence, with husbands consistently identified as the most frequent perpetrators of such violence within marriage.[1] Because Battered Women Syndrome is theorised as a response to precisely this kind of sustained, intimate violence, the gap between the statutory imminence requirement and the lived experience of a significant proportion of Indian women is not a marginal doctrinal curiosity but a recurring feature of the criminal justice system.
The architectural stability of India’s retail credit ecosystem has been profoundly disrupted by the intersection of smartphone ubiquity, data-driven underwriting, and regulatory arbitrage. While traditional credit delivery mechanisms—ranging from scheduled commercial banks to non-banking financial companies (NBFCs)—operate within a highly codified, risk-averse supervisory matrix managed by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), an expansive, shadow parallel economy has flourished. This shadow network comprises unregulated entities that leverage digital infrastructure to extend credit outside the perimeter of prudential oversight[1]. The proposed Banning of Unregulated Lending Activities (BULA) Bill represents the state’s ultimate legislative counter-offensive. It aims to establish an absolute statutory prohibition on any credit-extending activity that lacks the explicit imprimatur of an official regulator. However, by choosing a sweeping prohibitory mechanism rather than a nuanced regulatory or licensing framework, the draft bill risks colliding with fundamental constitutional guarantees, disrupting federal legislative competence, and aggravating the very socio-economic vulnerabilities it seeks to cure.
The BULA Bill remains, at the time of writing, in draft form. The Department of Financial Services released it for stakeholder comment on 13 December 2024 and kept the initial comment window open until 13 February 2025, and it has not yet been formally introduced as a Bill in Parliament.[2] This procedural posture matters for the analysis that follows: because the text remains open to revision before formal introduction, the constitutional and federal vulnerabilities identified in this paper are not academic post-mortems on a settled statute but live drafting choices that Parliament retains a genuine opportunity to correct.
#Unregulated Digital Lending#Bula Bill#2024
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Today traditional arranged marriages in India, which was historically a sacred and indissoluble union between families rather than just individuals, is now undergoing a significant transformation. This Research paper addresses the question to what extent have demographic imbalances, economic transformations, educational expansion, and technological disruptions contributed to the major decline of traditional arranged marriage in India as a universal institution, and how do these factors vary across class, region, and gender. Synthesizing data from the National Family Health Survey-5, National Sample Survey, Census records (1971–2011), and ethnographic studies, the paper identifies four primary drivers: Structural demographic imbalance creating 39 million surplus grooms, Economic liberalisation producing urban-rural divergence in marriage timing, Female educational expansion altering assortative mating and delaying marriage among educated women, and Dating applications enabling partner selection beyond caste boundaries. This paper argues that rather than uniform decline, India is experiencing polarised restructuring among disadvantaged populations that is rural, less-educated, lower-caste, marriage remains nearly universal but increasingly distressed (bride shortage, dowry inflation, cross-region migration) among privileged populations (urban, highly educated, wealthy), marriage is becoming selective, delayed, and increasingly questioned. This divergence has significant implications for gender relations, family policy, and social welfare in the world’s most populous nation.
#Marriage Decline#Demographic Transition#Delayed Marriage
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Contemporary digital surveillance and the expansion of state-controlled Artificial Intelligence and mass data collection have provoked anxiety about Orwellian surveillance states which Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four so presciently imagined. This research examines whether the situation of contemporary state surveillance creates Orwellian legal and ethical nightmares, and critiques the efficacy of legal protections for the right to privacy. Using a mixed-doctrinal and empirical approach, this paper offers an in-depth and critical analysis of the legal frameworks comprising constitutional provisions, international and regional human rights law, and case law, and correlates this with a descriptive analysis of survey data derived from an anonymous Google Forms survey with ten respondents. This research used a five-item Likert-style survey to collect data regarding the respondents’ views on the expansion of surveillance, fear of data privacy, the greatest threat to privacy, the perceived sufficiency of privacy laws, and the perceived similarity of modern-day state surveillance to the year Nineteen Eighty-Four. This study found that the public believes the expansion of state surveillance is vastly evident (80%), is highly concerned about state-sponsored data privacy (70%), and is unconvinced about the sufficiency of existing state-sponsored data privacy laws (70% expressed disagreement), and that contemporary state-sponsored data privacy laws and Orwell’s dystopia are highly congruent (70% expressed agreement). Data Privacy, by far, is the greatest state-sponsored surveillance concern. Within the context of proportionality and necessity within state-sponsored data privacy laws from the Puttaswamy case to the Court of Justice for the European Union and the European Court of Human Rights, this research concludes that contemporary state-sponsored data privacy laws and Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, while far from perfect, are congruent and relevant.
#Government Surveillance#Right To Privacy#Digital Constitutionalism
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Law as an independent institution mainly consists of rules, statutes, presidents, etc. But sometimes,
these aren’t enough to attain the ultimate purpose of having a living legal system, that is to provide
justice. For this purpose, law collaborates with several other disciplines like social science,
psychology, philosophy, biology, and chemistry.
Toxicology, in its essence is a scientific discipline that deals mainly with chemistry, biology and
medical science, which was introduced in the field of law by Mathieu Orfila in the Lafarge murder
case in 1840, Tulle, France.
Before toxicology was formally introduced, justice in cases of poisoning were solved mainly on
qualitative and circumstantial evidence like, who was present, who had the motive, who had the
knowledge? How did the poison get there and how did it come in contact to the victim? If the
suspect pleads innocent and says that he is being framed who has the strongest motive to frame
the suspect? Could it be possible that the case is simply non maintainable and the death was a
complete accident or natural cause or mistake of the victim himself?
Though none of these questions seem valid and legally material enough to solely determine a
whole judgment, it was the best method in absence of any proper method of study of poisoning
and hazardous substances. This is the gap that Toxicology was created to fill.
The scale of this challenge remains considerable in India today. National Crime Records Bureau
data for 2022 record that chemical poisoning accounted for roughly a quarter of all suicides
reported nationally, underscoring why a scientifically reliable method of establishing the cause
and circumstances of death continues to be indispensable to the administration of criminal justice.1
The following article seeks to study what toxicology is, what are the different sub-divisions of
toxicology, and why they are necessary. We also try to enhance our understanding with the help
of case laws and illustrations.
The Indian constitution provides the Fundamental rights to its citizens it also sets the Fundamental Duties as mentioned under part IVA[1] of the constitution of India under Article 51A[2]. The main aim of these duties are to instill feelings of patriotism unity and responsibility amoungst the citizens although all these duties remain unenforceable in the court of law. This research paper tries understands the effects of non enforceability on the civil behaviour and how it is affecting the people as a whole. Through the analytical and doctrinal method of research it studies the constitutional interpretations, judicial explanations and the reasoning of the landmark cases and the committee recommendations to assess whether the making the Fundamental Duties legally binding can help the society in enhancing the society by encouraging the feelings of responsibility and awareness. This research paper also takes expert opinions of legal scholars and it refers to articles on Fundamental Duties by DD Basu. This research paper also compares the Fundamental Duties of many countries like China, Russia in which such duties are enforceable in the court of law and some countries take such duties as moral obligations such as Japan and USA. This research papers also advises that India should follow a method of selective enforceability in which only certain part would remain enforceable. This research paper concludes by stating it can be understood total total enforceability may not work as a whole but targeting essential certain parts enforcing it can bride the gap between duties and rights in India. Lastly this research paper also provides with the future scope for research on this topic.
#Fundamental Duties#Article 51a#Constitution Of India
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The judicial conception of intimate autonomy and the constitutional understanding of “family” under Article 21 have undergone a remarkable transformation from a narrow, heteronormative understanding of marriage to queer relationships, live-in partnerships and “chosen families” outside the realm of biological or marital relations. This reflects a widening judicial awareness that decisional autonomy, dignity, and the right to choose an intimate partner merit the same constitutional protection as formal marriage. This shift has been bolstered by legislation such as the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005, which covers relationships “like marriage” and not only solemnized unions and yet this progress is in tension with an expanding architecture of control: the notice-and-objection procedure under the Special Marriage Act, 1954, anti-conversion laws, mandatory live-in relationship registries under the Uniform Civil Codes of 2025–26, and the extra-legal violence of Khap Panchayats. Together, these produce a “temporal trap” in secular marriage law and a “carceral turn” in cohabitation regulation, exposing couples to surveillance and harassment precisely where the law promises refuge. The Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Amendment Bill, 2026, also highlights the contradictory nature of the state’s position towards non-conforming identities. While there have been judicial advances, there remains a real gap between constitutional principle and statutory/administrative practice. To achieve true reform, it is necessary to dismantle surveillance-based regimes of registration, enact a dedicated federal law against honour-based crimes, and reform the publication requirements of the Special Marriage Act, to protect the dignity, privacy and autonomy of those whose intimate choices fall outside majoritarian norms.
#Ntimate Autonomy#Article 21#Queer Relationships
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The landmark Navtej Singh Johar v. Union of India (2018)[1] Judgement had decriminalized consensual same-sex relationships in India, fundamentally altering an entire ambit of legal sexual orientations and intimacy. However, this jurisprudence gave rise to contradictory juxtaposition prevailing in Hindu marriage law, particularly Section 13(2) (ii) of the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955, which retains sodomy as a ground for divorce. This article examines the surge of legal incongruity resulting from this progression.
The following paper will focus on three foci: the thriving existence of sodomy as a matrimonial offense despite its decriminalization; the gendered construction of adultery; and impossibility of bigamy in same-sex relationships due to the absence of marriage equality thereby creating a void for spousal infidelity involving same- sex partners.
#Section 377 Decriminalization#Hindu Marriage Act#Sodomy
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India's enactment of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita (BNSS), 2023 and the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam (BSA), 2023 marks a paradigm shift in the architecture of criminal justice
- from a confession driven paradigm inherited from colonial law to a forensic integrated model judicially mandated by statute. Section 176(3) BNSS introduces the first binding obligation on investigative agencies to conduct forensic examination for offences punishable by seven years or more, while the BSA elevates electronic records to the status of primary evidence. At the same moment, artificial intelligence (AI) technologies such as spanning DNA probabilistic genotyping, AI-assisted ballistic comparison, facial recognition, and predictive behavioural analytics - from convolutional neural networks for fingerprint analysis to large language models for crime scene triage - are proliferating across forensic workflows worldwide.
This paper argues that Section 176(3) BNSS unintentionally establishes the statutory foundation for AI-assisted forensic investigations, yet India's evidentiary framework remains insufficiently equipped to regulate algorithmic evidence. it undertakes a comprehensive techno-jurisprudential analysis of the intersection between BNSS/BSA mandates and AI-integrated forensic investigations, questions the 'black box' opacity problem, algorithmic bias, and Article 21 for fair trial implications, surveys the US Daubert standard and EU AI Act as regulatory models, and proposes a legislative and institutional blueprint - including a codified 'Right to Explanation', mandatory algorithmic audits, and standardised forensic SOPs - to ensure that India's precision-forensics revolution upholds, rather than undermines, the constitutional promise of justice.
In August 2024, a Bench of two judges of the Supreme Court of India found itself facing a decision
of the Calcutta High Court that, in effect, had decriminalized an act of sex between a twenty-fiveyear-old man and a fourteen-year-old girl on the basis of judicial constructs of “non-exploitative
relationships” and “older adolescents.” Nine months later, in May 2025, the same Bench, faced
with the practical effects of its own corrective ruling, used Article 142 of the Constitution to stay
sentence despite a wholly unchallenged conviction. When considered together, the two rulings in
In Right to Privacy of Adolescents provide both definition of the law with respect to strict liability
offenses as well as demonstrate the continuing uncertainties in the legislative field. This paper
reviews the legislative landscape as it exists within BNS, 2023 and the BNSS, 2023, and places
the resultant constitutional deficiency in context with the privacy law developed in Puttaswamy,
as well as Canada’s and the United Kingdom’s close-in-age legislation.
Currently, the Indian criminal justice system faces a serious issue with incarceration. The occupancy of prisoners is 573,220 in places built to accommodate only 425,609 inmates, and undertrials are 75.8% of the total prison population. This indicates that the current imprisonment-focused approach to punishment has failed in several aspects such as rehabilitation, deterrence, and public safety.
The following paper will provide an assessment of India's ability and need to re-evaluate its criminal justice system beyond relying on incarceration as the primary means to address crimes. Through employing a doctrinal, comparative, and socio-legal research method, the discussion will look at theories underlying non-penal punishment. The study will examine the legal obligations that can be gleaned from Article 14 and Article 21 of the Constitution of India, taking into consideration the lack of use of present non-institutional measures under the Probation of Offenders Act 1958 and the newly passed Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita 2023. Furthermore, the following paper will discuss relevant court rulings such as Hussainara Khatoon v Home Secretary, State of Bihar, Arnesh Kumar v State of Bihar, and Bachan Singh v State of Punjab.
With reference to comparative case examples of Norway, New Zealand, Japan, and South Africa, this essay provides an overview of various alternatives to incarceration across the globe, ranging from community-focused and restorative justice initiatives to forms of supervised probation. The primary claim put forward by this analysis is that the overrepresentation of marginalized groups in India’s prison system, alongside the social and economic implications of incarceration, and the inherent constitutional right to human dignity combine to demonstrate that criminal penal reform is not only imperative but also mandatory in India. In terms of specific policy recommendations, these include a comprehensive Sentencing Code, an overhaul of probation services, a National Restorative Justice Model, the establishment of open prisons, and reforms to the existing system of bail. At the center of the core thesis is the notion that punishment, in a democratic constitutional state, should primarily aim at achieving accountability and restorative justice.
While generative artificial intelligence has made production of text, images, music or other software code and audiovisual works more efficient than ever before, it has also disrupted the foundational structure of copyright law. Such concerns lead to three interrelated questions in Indian copyright doctrine, as follows: does the use of protected works for training purposes infringe rights, when (if ever) do AI-generated outputs constitute infringing copies or adaptations, and can the mere imitation of a human creator’s style be legally determined without enclosing ideas, methods and aesthetics? Despite containing provisions on computer-generated works, exclusive rights and infringement, fair dealing and moral rights, The Copyright Act 1957[1] was not drafted to address large scale model training or probabilistic content generation. This paper is doctrinal in nature, inspecting Indian statutes, constitutional provisions as well as case law and policy pertaining to international obligations under copyright laws and comparative jurisdictions including the European Union, Japan and the US. It contends that Indian law ought to reject both extremes: otherwise-free licence for training on protected data, and an over-broad copyright veto over all machine learning. Instead, India should at least move towards a careful calibrated framework that divides copying that takes place during training, substitutive output stage as well as author-specific creative imitation. This paper suggests a new exception for text-and-data-mining by establishing lawful access and transparency/opt-out safeguards through compulsory or collective licensing, plus a human creative control test on AI-assisted authorship, followed by a fault-sensitive liability model for developers, deployers and users.
#Generative Artificial Intelligence#Copyright Infringement#Training Data
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“Innocent until proven guilty” is a phrase repeated in courtrooms, OTT series, films and newspaper headlines alike. Deriving its legitimacy from Section 104 of the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, 2023 (BSA), and often regarded as the “golden thread” of criminal jurisprudence, it reflects the Indian law’s aim to remain objective and fair. However, when an accused, who is “innocent in the eyes of the law” steps into the courtroom, a contrary reality unfolds. The judgment of guilt or innocence is formed by appearance. The colour of the kurta, the slouched posture, or averted eyes form perceptions before the judge’s formal pronouncement of “Guilty” or “Not Guilty”.
The tension between legal theory and psychological reality lies at the heart of the criminal trial. While every feature of the formal process is designed to insulate fact-finding from prejudice, the courtroom is also an intensely human arena. It is a space shaped by visual first impressions, narrative expectations, and the cognitive shortcuts that operate below the threshold of conscious deliberation. This paper explores that tension, tracing the gap between what the law demands of its participants and what the mind actually does when confronted with an accused person. It draws on legal doctrine, constitutional safeguards, psychological research, and the lived experience of high-profile Indian prosecutions to argue that appearance, demeanour, and presentation are not incidental to the trial; they are, in practice, a parallel form of evidence that operates without the discipline of admissibility rules, cross-examination, or the standard of proof. The implications for fair trial rights, the equality guarantee under Article 14, and the integrity of the adversarial process are both significant and underexamined.
#Presumption Of Innocence#Courtroom Psychology#Cognitive Bias
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This article aims to analyze the transformation of initial introduction of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) to a mandatory compliance imposed on Indian companies, under section 135 of Companies Act,2013. It examines the Backdoor taxation like characteristics of CSR upon non-compliance. While originally conceived as a ‘spend-or-explain’ arrangement, it has been transformed into ‘spend-or-forfeit’ framework by subsequent amendments. This defeats the purpose of voluntary philanthropy, making Corporate Social Responsibility a “Check-Book Philanthropy”. While existing literature evaluates the social impact of CSR frameworks, minimal attention has been given to its tax resembling characteristics following amendments relating to unspent CSR obligations. This article aims to argue that CSR in India is nor a purely philanthropic concept, nor a taxation idea. It represents a regulatory hybrid that incorporates significant fiscal characteristics while retaining a limited degree of corporate spending autonomy. It explores themes like ‘Check-book Philanthropy’, ‘Earmarked Taxation’ and ‘Ring-fenced Taxation’. Further examining theories of ‘Colorable legislation’ and ‘Shareholder Primacy’, fiduciary obligation under section 166 and a doctrinal analysis of Section 135, this paper concludes that mandatory CSR is nor understood as pure philanthropy, nor as conventional taxation. Rather it is best studied as a regulatory hybrid that blurs the boundary between corporate governance and fiscal policy.
#Corporate Social Responsibility (csr)#Section 135 Of The Companies Act#2013
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India has a long history of hosting refugees from Tibet, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, Myanmar, and other neighbouring regions, yet it remains outside the 1951 Refugee Convention and the 1967 Protocol and lacks a dedicated domestic refugee law. Instead, refugee protection is governed through general immigration laws and discretionary executive policies, resulting in inconsistent treatment of different refugee groups. This paper examines the evolution of international refugee law, India's historical experience with refugee protection, and the structural deficiencies of its existing legal framework. It analyses India's obligations under international human rights law, the constitutional protection of life and personal liberty, and judicial responses to refugee issues despite the absence of specific legislation. The study also explores the reasons behind India's refusal to accede to the Refugee Convention, including concerns relating to national security, sovereignty, demographic pressures, and regional geopolitics. By comparing India's approach with regional refugee frameworks in Africa and Latin America, the paper argues that the current ad hoc system creates legal uncertainty, unequal treatment, and inadequate procedural safeguards for refugees and asylum seekers. It concludes that India should enact a comprehensive domestic refugee law that incorporates internationally recognised principles such as refugee status determination, non-refoulement, and minimum standards of protection while remaining tailored to India's constitutional values and security concerns. Such legislation would provide greater legal certainty, improve administrative consistency, and balance humanitarian obligations with legitimate state interests.
#Refugee Protection#India#Refugee Law
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Domestic violence in India continues to be one of the most widespread yet deeply silenced forms
of gender-based violence. While the immediate physical injuries of domestic violence are visible
and documented, the long-term consequences suffered by survivors remain largely invisible to
both law and society. This paper examines the enduring effects of domestic violence on women
survivors in India across psychological, physical, social, and economic dimensions. The National
Family Health Survey-5 reveals that nearly thirty percent of Indian women between eighteen and
forty-nine years have experienced spousal violence.1 Research consistently shows that survivors
develop serious long-term conditions including post-traumatic stress disorder, chronic depression,
and anxiety disorders that persist for years after the violence ends. Children who witness domestic
violence within households further carry these traumatic experiences into adulthood, creating
cycles of intergenerational trauma that extend the harm beyond the immediate survivor. Beyond
psychological damage, domestic violence leaves survivors economically dependent, socially
isolated, and physically weakened through chronic health conditions. This paper argues that
understanding these long-term effects is essential for building effective policy responses, support systems, and legal frameworks that go beyond immediate protection to address genuine recovery
and rehabilitation of survivors in India.
#Domestic Violence#Long-term Effects#Ptsd
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In the hyper and competitive arena of digital marketplaces and dark patterns it is a
deceptive interface designs that exploit cognitive vulnerabilities that have become insidious
tools of behavioral manipulation, eroding consumer autonomy and skewing market dynamics.
The CCPA Guidelines for Prevention and Regulation of Dark Patterns 2023 prohibit 13 patterns
including subscription traps and disguised ads under section 3,4, and 5. In digital marketplaces
where platforms such as amazon, flipkart, and meesho deploy tactics like drip pricing, false
urgency, basket sneaking, and confirm shaming to drive unintended consumer actions. The
Consumer Protection Act 2019 defines the unfair trade practices under section 2(47). Section
4 of the Competition Act 2002 provides that dark patterns enabling behavioral lock-in that can
distort the competition which is to be seen in CCI probes against amazon and flipkart. In India
while the CCPA fines remain modest relative to Big Tech revenues, global benchmarks offer
sharper tools like the EU Digital Services Act article 25 of it which bans dark patterns outright
with fines up to 6% of global turnover. The CCPA in June 2025 mandated the self-audits across
50+ platforms with compliance declaration. The National Cyber and AI Center framework has
introduced risk-based AI assurance that is targeting manipulative nudges in digital marketplaces while harmonizing with India AI missions. It advocates a unified digital fairness
authority with mandatory behavioral audits, public pattern registries, and turnover that is linked
with the penalties to deter A/B tested manipulations that is ensuring platforms prioritize ethical
design over exploitative nudges.
#Cognitive Vulnerabilities#Ccpa Guidelines For Prevention And Regulation Of Dark Patterns 2023#Eu Digital Services Act
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