ARTICLES

1. Law’s imposition of a heteronormative timeline in a rapidly ageing authoritarian state

Qian Liu
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This article discusses how China, an authoritarian state with a rapidly ageing population, uses its laws and regulations to impose a heteronormative timeline on its citizens to get married and give birth. I use the pressure felt by China’s ‘leftover’ women to get married according to a heteronormative timeline to discuss law’s role in shaping and reshaping our understanding of age, ageing, and time. These women’s experience reveals law’s seemingly invisible role in imposing and sustaining dominant timelines, especially in authoritarian states that actively use law and media to depict those who are different from the majority as deviants. This article explores and exposes law’s invisibility and hegemonic nature in everyday life, in an effort to explain how different laws work among themselves and with other normative orders to set a timeline that eliminates differences and imposes pressure on those who ‘fall behind’ to catch up with the mainstream. Using legal pluralism as an analytical tool, this article further examines how state laws depend on and work with other normative orders to sustain dominant timelines. It is my hope that this article could invite law and society scholars to rethink how state law violently eliminates diverse ways people organise their everyday lives by imposing dominant timelines on them.

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2. Reforms in legal aid and awareness with regard to the aged in India: A case for an inclusive approach

Rajashree K & Chetan Singai
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With the increase in the ageing population in India and globally, there is a need to understand the specific challenges faced by the aged from the perspective of legal impediments for securing their well-being. Laws and legal institutions need to be simplified while improving the overall accessibility to justice for senior citizens. There is a need to usher in systemic changes to protect senior citizens through an inclusive legal system.

This article attempts to understand the challenges faced by senior citizens and traces how legal aid and awareness can be an effective tool to remedy some of the issues they confront. It begins by offering a descriptive analysis of the relevant Law Commission reports to understand the aspirations that are laid down with reference to granting legal aid and awareness. Such an analysis was sought so as to provide inputs to the semi-structured interviews that were conducted with senior citizens who were exposed to certain vulnerabilities because of lack of accessibility of legal aid/awareness.

The insights from the interviews provide evidence of the experiences of senior citizens in engaging with the law and legal institutions. These experiences aid in presenting the gaps between the recommendations of the Law Commission reports and the realities on the ground. To this end, the article examines the role and relevance of legal aid for the aged while highlighting the inability of the system to respond to some of the legal needs of the elderly and how these needs can be served by building a robust and rigorous legal aid and awareness mechanism.

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3. An empirical study on the client’s perspective in decision making with regard to lawyer selection for trial courts: Does grey hair matter

H S Sharmila & Sunitha Abhay Jain
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In higher courts, statutory interpretation and persuasion of the court with new perspectives on legal principles are critical. Whereas, the main focus of the subordinate courts is on evidential underpinnings. Hence, the lawyers in all courts are an indispensable part of the judicial process and play a seminal role in the dispensation of justice. The existing literature demonstrates that engaging a senior lawyer increases the chances of winning cases. However, young lawyers today make their mark by establishing their own offices, succeeding in the profession, while some remain the dark horses of their incumbent seniors. Against this backdrop, the authors explore the client’s perception of the lawyer selection process and the significance of lawyers’ age using a mixed methods approach. The data for this study was gathered from trial court clients using a convenient sampling method. The qualitative data were collected by conducting semi-structured interviews with clients. Interviews were analysed at a thematic level and broad themes were identified and used as constructs for a quantitative survey questionnaire. The quantitative data were analysed through Pearson correlation, regression analysis, and factor analysis. The study determined that lawyer’s efficiency is a key factor considered by trial court clients in selecting their lawyers. The results also revealed that there exists a significant positive correlation between the age of the lawyer and the client’s decision making when choosing their lawyers. In the end, the implications of the findings are discussed.

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4. Law’s temporality and the construction of death-worlds: Custodial neglect of older prisoners in India

Deblina Dey
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The vexed relation between law and age/ageing is most apparent in the context of older prisoners. Late life may be accompanied by disabilities and dependencies. So, access to appropriate forms of care including medical care becomes even more crucial in custodial institutions like prisons where older prisoners live isolated from society. Since the spread of COVID-19, there have been attempts to decongest Indian prisons. However, older political prisoners charged (not convicted) for anti-state, terrorist activities continue to suffer in prison due to denial of bail. I argue that elderliness and the condition of health ought to be factors on which bail should be given irrespective of the nature of the charges. By using the framework of ‘law as temporality’, I elucidate how the politics around the denial of bail by courts in India and the treatment of older political prisoners by prison authorities lead to the production of a ‘carceral time’. This article discusses how carceral time structures the embodied experiences of ageing in ways that defy the human rights of prisoners. Time not only disciplines but also determines the expendability of ageing bodies, particularly when time is an insidious form of waiting, as in the case of older political prisoners in the Bhima Koregaon case in India. This article highlights the need for the criminal justice system in India to consider elderliness as a ground for compassionate treatment towards older prisoners, and to uphold their rights to healthcare and to live with dignity.

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5. Ageing identities and narratives of loss: (Re)Contextualising cognitive degeneration in ‘reel’ space and ‘real’ lives

Debashrita Dey & Priyanka Tripathi
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The ageing/aged subject across different socio-cultural, legal, economic, and medical discourses has been imagined and defined as an ‘othered’ body marked with the differences of incapacitation, loss, and decay. Cognitive impairment is considered to be a potent signifier moulding elderly lives that leave them bereft of autonomy, agency, and choice. Alzheimer’s, dementia, and Parkinson’s disease are the most commonly found progressive cognitive disabilities that incapacitate individuals mentally and physically, making them a redundant subject of care. The rupture from the state of ‘actual’ being to a ‘blurred’ existence, arising from being subjected to a state of dependency, scars the essence of their selfhood, alienating them further from the family/society. This article, through a detailed explication of the cinematic portrayal of Alzheimer’s in two films—Maine Gandhi Ko Nahin Mara (I Did Not Kill Gandhi) (2005) and Mai (Mother) (2013)—attempts to re-engage with how the age-induced disease, often correlated with insanity and incompetence, negates the embodied subjectivity of the patients. Through an alternative reading of the ‘subject bodies’, these films challenge the normative understanding of how cognitive degeneration foists a symbolic death on the ‘living’ patient thereby foregrounding the need for special assistance and inclusive treatment. The article also probes the gendered act of caregiving which gets reiterated through the films and projects the adult daughter as the primary caregiver in an integrative manner. Thus, by analysing the elderly parent–adult daughter relational exchange, the article suggests how the reality around Alzheimer’s/senile dementia gets determined for the cared-for subject and the caregiver.

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6. Examining the living metaphor in the Indian Constitution

Shivangi Gangwar & Aishwarya Pagedar

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One popular understanding of the Indian Constitution is that it is a living document that evolves with time. Even though this metaphor has been used consistently by all three branches of the Indian state, its use in Indian legal texts is underexplored—as of most metaphors generally. In this article, we critically evaluate the application of the living metaphor in Indian constitutional discourse. We first provide an overview of the use of metaphors generally, and especially in the legal field. We then identify the origins and trace the use of the living metaphor by studying select Supreme Court judgments which have likened the Constitution to a living text and analyse the Court’s reasons, if any, for doing so. A comparative analysis of how the Canadian, US, and Australian courts have employed the living metaphor demonstrates how the Indian experience differs in its application of the metaphor. We find that the Supreme Court has used different variants of the living metaphor, primarily to expand the ambit of Part III of the Constitution. However, due to the inconsistent and unreliable use of this metaphor, we find that this has the potential to lead to illiberal results. We thus make a case for the formulation of a doctrine of living constitutionalism which we think will be more resilient to anti-democratic challenges.

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7. Theorising a desirous child: Case comment on Anversinh v State of Gujarat

Avantika Tiwari
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8. Tracy Gendron: Ageism Unmasked: Exploring Age Bias and How to End It

Mallika Ramachandran
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9. Linda A. Parker: Cannabinoids and the brain
Khagesh Gautam
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10. ‘What is the child innocent of? Sexual knowledge of course!’: an interview with Shohini Ghosh
Oishik Sircar

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11. Age, ageing, and the philosophy of ‘elder law’: An interview with Israel (Issi) Doron

Ankita Gandhi
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