BFL201 | Family Law I

Family law is a Bar Council mandated area of study and is taught across two core courses in the B.A. LL.B. Programme. The first of the two is the present course and serves as a broad introduction to the family as a social institution and its legal form(s). This course consists of six modules.

The first module will introduce you to the conceptual ingredients of family law.

We will begin by thinking critically about the family as a social institution – about its history and its relationship with the state. We will understand how the law identifies a ‘hindu’, ‘muslim’, ‘christian’, and ‘parsi’, and thus how different religious personal laws come to govern one’s rights and obligations within a family. Central to this relationship is an understanding of the different sources of family law. Finally, this module will put legal ethnographers and practicing lawyers in conversation to lay out a broad account of the lived experience of family law through a discussion of its practice in Family Courts.

Modules 2-4

The second module will deal with the Hindu Personal Law.

The third module will deal with Muslim Personal Law

The fourth module will deal with Christian law, Parsi law and Secular laws

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. We will pay close attention to the differences between these codes and their regulatory modes. This also 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 officers interpret, execute and re-write religious personal laws.

The fifth module will explore the law on custody, guardianship, adoption and legitimacy.

This module will focus on the doctrine that forms the law on these rights and obligations. We will examine some of their otherwise neglected aspects and its changing content as individuals and families contend with the exigencies of competing jurisdictions.

The sixth module surveys some of the contemporary debates and emerging jurisprudence in family law in India.

Having laid out a robust, representative account of the first half of family law we will end the course by examining some key debates in family law in India today – same-sex marriage and marriage equality, domestic violence and the Uniform Civil Code.