Tue Dec 23, 2014 by Anil Kalhan

PANEL: The Postcolonial Lives of Colonial Law in South Asia – AALS Annual Meeting (Sat Jan 3 2015, 3:30pm, Washington DC)

Association of American Law Schools (AALS)
Annual Meeting

Section on Law and South Asian Studies

The Postcolonial Lives of Colonial Law in South Asia
(Papers to be published in the American University International Law Review)

Marriott Wardman Park Hotel, Washington, DC
Virginia Suite A, Lobby Level
Saturday, January 3, 2015, 3:30pm–5:15pm
Section business meeting will be held from 5:10pm–5:15pm

As scholars across a range of disciplines have observed, the process of decolonization in South Asia has been long and uneven—in significant part due to the persistence of the legal, administrative, and judicial institutions that were inherited from the British colonial state. This session examines the significance of these continuities between colonial and postcolonial laws and public institutions in South Asia. To what extent, if any, was decolonization a moment of rupture? How did colonial laws and legal institutions survive the formal end of colonial rule and how have postcolonial states in South Asia adopted and adapted them? And with what contemporary implications and consequences? The panelists will investigate law in colonial and postcolonial South Asia by looking both horizontally across imperial space and vertically across historical time. The speakers bring to the session interdisciplinary perspectives drawn from law, history, political science, and postcolonial studies.

Click here to download the full program and paper abstracts [PDF], or scroll down to view in your browser. Registration information for the AALS Annual Meeting is available here.

Panelists:
Elizabeth Kolsky, Department of History, Villanova University
Dinusha Panditaratne, Faculty of Law, Chinese University of Hong Kong
Kalyani Ramnath, Department of History, Princeton University
Umakanth Varottil, Faculty of Law, National University of Singapore

Chair/Discussant:
Anil Kalhan, Thomas R. Kline School of Law, Drexel University

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We encourage interested faculty and staff at AALS member law schools to sign up to join the Section on Law and South Asian Studies through the AALS website. The link to the section’s website is available here [AALS login information required]. Instructions on how to join the section and receive section announcements by email are as follows:

1. Go the AALS website: http://www.aals.org
2. Click Log-in in the top right corner. our username will be your law school email address. If you don’t have your password or cannot remember it click “Forgot Your Password” and follow the directions.
3. Once logged in, click the ‘online store’ link to the left and then select ‘Section Membership’ at the top.
4. AALS Section sign-up uses a standard shopping cart process. Select the section you are interested in, add it to cart, and check out once you have selected all the sections of which you wish to be a member (the dues payment will be $0).
5. Once you have signed up for a Section you will be automatically added to the Section’s listservs. [link]

Interested individuals who are not at AALS member law schools may contact Prof. Priya Gupta ([email protected]) to be added to the Section’s email list.

Download (PDF, 39KB)