LFL201 | Family Law-I

The study of law at the university level ostensibly prepares students for a career in the legal field. As such, the classroom must balance the priorities, perspectives, and methods of both academics and practitioners. In this course, you will learn to adopt both perspectives, consciously developing a multifaceted repertoire of skills and methods for engaging with the law. We will examine the competing and complementary demands of academic and practitioner approaches, a central theme in our study of Family Law. This dual perspective will shape the structure and expectations of the class, as well as how we engage with texts throughout the term.

This course will require a significant amount of writing each week. We will incorporate various writing exercises to achieve two primary goals:

1. Using writing as a tool for critical thinking.

2. Enhancing your legal and academic writing skills.

This course outline consists of the broad layout of the course, its rationale and module break up. At the end of Week 1 you will receive your assessment structure and guidelines for each element of your assessment.

This course is mandated by the Bar Council of India and forms a part of the core curriculum of your LL.B Programme. It is the first of two courses in Family Law and deals largely with – marriage and divorce, matrimonial obligations from which rights and reliefs emerge in family law and questions of adoption and guardianship. We are also centrally concerned with the changing nature of the family, those excluded by the institution, alternate kinship ties and contemporary debates in the legal regulation of the family.

In India, religious personal laws enjoy the sanction of law and hence are segregated with a supporting architecture of what may be called ‘secular’ statutes. This course therefore traces the study of Family law through the study of these distinct personal law codes and their similar but significantly distinct relationships with India’s ‘secular’, ‘reformatory’ family law statutes. This is a deliberate move towards understanding, subject formation, matrimonial obligations, and rights and reliefs as conceptually produced in each personal law and the way statutory provisions including the registration of marriages under the Special and Foreign Marriage Acts interact with these religious conceptions of obligations and reliefs. We will pay close attention to the dierences between these codes and their regulatory modes and also problematise our notions of secular reform in Indian law. Importantly, this allows for a more intricate and nuanced study of the stakes of a uniform civil code and the way a secular legal order and its ocers interpret, execute and re-write religious personal laws.

The study of each personal law will begin with a historical study of sources -in family law, particularly the origins of religious legal codes in English, with a focus on codification and the history and politics of the legal commentary. With that historical and social lens in place we will begin considering these sources as lawyers do, to produce a complete overview of three central facets –

legal subjecthood, application and maintainability, obligations, and the rights and reliefs that derive from these obligations. We will develop and work with a method of reading statutes that is informed by this conceptual framework. This will give you a complete analytical framework with which to work and we will learn how to return to it as both scholars and practitioners.

From here we begin our survey of precedents. We will focus more on understanding a broad trajectory of jurisprudence and cement your understanding of the broader conceptual framework, so that your training in this course allows you to continuously amend your understanding of personal law as new cases and questions of law emerge.