Regimes of Legality Ethnography of Criminal Cases in South Asia

• Provides an anthropological approach
• Examines the way criminal cases are dealt with by courts in South Asia
• Takes criminal cases as a framework to study how power dynamics and individual strategies either comply or clash with a legal setting
• Analyses the underlying tension in institutional contexts

An anthropological study on judicial practices in South Asia, this volume takes criminal cases as frameworks to examine power dynamics within a legal setting. Case studies in this book analyse a set of state and non-state institutions and the practices of people associated with them. The essays delve into the underlying tension in institutional contexts between legal practitioners such as police officers, lawyers, and judges who orient their claims towards neutralism, objectivity, and equality and a set of everyday interactions and decisions where cultural, social, and political factors play a major role.

This volume is based on the premise that the study of judiciary cases, in all their multifaceted complexity, provides a pertinent and original angle from which to access some issues of South Asia. The contributors examine the discourses and relationships around criminal cases that shape how ideas circulate in the public sphere and how mediation and negotiation between different actors characterize police and court practices.

Readership: Primary market: Institutional libraries - university departments of law; South Asian studies and gender study centres; and research organizations dealing with legal anthropology. Secondary market: Legal practititoners, academicians, postgraduate and doctoral students of law, and researchers, particularly those working in the area of legal anthropology. The book will also prove useful for civil society organizations dealing with civil rights, gender study centres, and crime studies research centres, journalists on law beat, and policy makers.