The playing field of law is growing wider and more complex with time. This is not only the result of the irrelevance of national boundaries owing to globalization, whereby legal changes in India have repercussions elsewhere, but also because of the multiple domains that are engaged and impacted by the operation of any particular law, even within the country. Many well intentioned legislations fail to get off the ground or achieve the purposes that they were meant to address. This could be because of failures to take account of the economic costs of operationalizing the legislation at the pre-legislative stage, or it could be because of the pressure that the new law might create on the administrative and judicial structures.

A new law might also be problematic because of the outcomes that it might produce in interaction with other existing laws and structures. Social science scholarship has drawn our attention to the unintended and unanticipated outcomes of legislations, the relevance of which is yet to be appreciated by legal professionals and researchers. There is a steadily growing awareness that analyses which focus on the internal logic or legality of legislations alone, are inadequate to grasp the full range of issues that are at stake in any proposed legislation. The Law and Policy Research Group, at the Jindal Global Law School, brings the tools of legal analysis and policy analysis in conversation with each other. Its Law & Policy Brief aims to generate informed public debate by undertaking interdisciplinary analyses of Bills pending beforethe Parliament, recent court judgments, amendments to existing laws, recently enacted laws, and other topical legal issues that have important policy implications.

Professor Ashish Bharadwaj and Professor Saptarshi Mandal – faculty members at JGLS – serve as the Convenors of the Law and Policy Research Group and Editors of the Brief. The first issue of the inaugural volume of the Law and Policy Brief was published in January 2015. Since then 13 issues have been published on topics ranging from Disabilities Bill 2014, IPR education in India, UID Project, Environmental policies of the current government, Ten years of RTI Act, NJAC, Juvenile Justice Bill, National Policy on Domestic Workers and Rights of Transgender Persons Bill, 2014.