CCD214 | Constitutional Design Principles and Supreme Court Adjudication

D Lutz in his introduction to The Principles of Constitutional Design (2006) notes that the book is  written for ‘anyone anywhere sitting down to write a constitution.’ While constitution framers are  imagined to work on a tabula rasa to design a new constitution, the process of constitution  making does not cease at the moment of adoption. Legislatures, the executive and the judiciary  are continually engaged in a process of constitutional amendment, implementation and  interpretation respectively.

Through these modes the constitution is reshaped and remade on an ongoing basis. Though  Lutz suggests that the principles of constitutional design may be invoked only while writing a constitution, we may do well to acknowledge and adapt these principles while engaging with amendment, implementation and interpretation.

This course will explore how and to what extent these principles may be useful to courts in general, and more specifically to the Indian Supreme Court, while engaged in the process of constitutional interpretation. The course will engage  carefully with the last 20 years of Indian Supreme Court decision making in key cases that  invoke, or engage, these principles of constitutional design.

The course extends across 10 Weeks. Each week we will meet twice: on Tuesday and Thursday afternoon. Each session will engage with a specific topic including: constitutionalism, amendment, federalism, the separation of powers, local government, fundamental rights of equality, liberty and life; secularism; and the directive principles of state policy. At the end of the  course we will become familiar with the recent judgments of the Supreme Court. Moreover, we  will develop a political theory of constitutional law and institutional design in the manner described by J Waldron in Political Political Theory (2016).