VRÜ Verfassung und Recht in Übersee

This paper assesses feminist constitutional activism in India, i.e. feminist engagements with the Constitution with the aim of broadening women's rights. To this end, the paper looks at several generations of feminist activists. It shows how...

This paper makes the case for a theorising of gendered constitutionalism in postcolonial Africa on its own terms, rather than as an appendage or often afterthought to hegemonic and universalising impulses of Western liberal thought. More...

Tunisia can be considered as a recent example for gendered constitutionalism in the Global South. In 2014, the country adopted a new constitution in the context of the so-called Arab Spring and enshrined far-reaching women's rights in it. With the...

This paper situates itself within existing feminist constitutionalism analyses by noting that constitutions and constitutional processes are gendered and that constitutional norms may have different consequences for different genders. However, it...

This commentary is on one ‘promise to marry’ judgment and its feminist re-writing. Promise to marry cases involve a woman agreeing to sexual intercourse with a partner relying on his promise to marry her subsequently. In inter-caste...

The case of Anwar Ali Sarkar has been a founding precedent for equality jurisprudence in India and elsewhere. The case is most cited for the two-step reasonable classification test. Yet over the years, it has become increasingly clear that there...

In Asokan K.M. v. State of Kerala (2017) at the behest of a disgruntled Hindu father whose daughter had converted to Islam and married a man of her choice, the Kerala High Court (HC) cast the daughter, Hadiya, as a ‘vulnerable’ woman before...

Since income tax is levied on a progressive basis (depending on the income of each taxpayer), how we define the taxpayer or “tax unit” is of critical importance. In the 1960 ruling of Commissioner of Income Tax v. Indira Balakrishna, the Supreme...

President Jair Bolsonaro’s government (2019-2022) brought unprecedented turmoil to the Brazilian democracy. In this paper, we argue that Bolsonaro’s government builds on and expands pre-existing zones of authoritarianism embedded in the country....

While India possesses features conventionally associated with liberal democracies, it has lately been understood to suffer from “democratic backsliding”. Commentators have used descriptions like “authoritarianism”, “electoral autocracy”,...

Since the 2000s, scholars have been faced with a new phenomenon, which political scientists eventually labelled democratic backsliding. Law has not been central in studies of democratic backsliding, but it has not been completely absent either. In...

The purpose of this article is to investigate the abuse of presidential and administrative powers with a view to weakening environmental protection. We argue that the concept of “environmental authoritarianism”, designating both a democratic...