The Hate Crimes Clinic is an ongoing empirical research, involving the students of Jindal Global Law School, on the response of India’s criminal justice institutions to hate violence. The Clinic aims to utilize rigorous empirical methodologies to map the ways in which the police, courts, lawyers, and other criminal justice institutions react when vulnerable groups are targeted. In so doing, it seeks to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of these institutions in order to propose reform.

This research has become increasingly pertinent with a perceptible rise in violence against vulnerable groups. Hate crimes—or crimes that have been prima facie committed with bias or prejudiced motivation—do not exist as a legal category under the Indian penal regime. The closest legal category is that of ‘atrocities’ against the Scheduled Castes and Tribes. The Clinic hopes to intervene in debates on human rights, legal and institutional reform, developing empirical methodologies in legal studies, and discrimination and exclusion.

The Clinic aims to be a major resource for students who want to learn empirical methods for the study of Indian law. It sees itself as a platform that brings the students of Jindal Global Law School together with law students from other institutions, lawyers, human rights activists and advocates in pursuit of cultivating a more nuanced, textured and empirically sound understanding of access to justice in India.