India Schools

With the school year opening in much of the nation, educators will soon be facing two of their traditional challenges: how to raise funds for school operations and how to avoid legal challenges. A recent federal district court decision may actually help schools with both of those issues, even though the court ruled for a group of parents and against a school district on a very particular issue involving free-speech and establishment-of-religion questions in the realm of school fundraisers. A federal district judge in Houston has ruled that a Texas school district engaged in viewpoint discrimination in violation of the First Amendment’s free speech clause when it removed an explicit religious message as one option for greeting cards selected by parents as part of a school fundraiser.

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Court: Religion OK for Public School Fundraiser

In this Mint column , Narayan Ramachandran calls for a shift in attention from the classic corporate model of limited liability companies to a cooperative model that involves “a voluntary agreement to share, for the mutual benefit of all parties”. Although India is no stranger to the cooperative model (as the author demonstrates), it is the co-operative societies legislation that is usually used to carry out such activity. Strangely enough, the cooperative model finds its place in the Companies Act as well.

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Cooperatives and Producer Companies

A free and active press generally provides impetus for instilling enhanced corporate governance practices in any economy, as it does in India. However, conflicts of interest that the media faces may create distorted incentives that dilute these objectives. One such conflict is presented by the concept of “private treaties” whereby media enterprises take stakes in companies in return for agreeing to provide adequate media coverage for the investee company through advertisements, news reports, advertorials, etc

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Extending Securities Regulation to the Fourth Estate

The Ministry of Finance recently published on its website a report of the Working Group on Foreign Investment in India. The report seeks to address the complexity and overlaps in the existing regime on foreign investment in India and to propose a more streamlined framework.

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New Framework for Foreign Investment Proposed

  As noted in an earlier post, the Direct Taxes Code Bill has been introduced in Parliament. If enacted, it will come into force from 2012. Below is a comparative chart discussing the differences in the provisions in the current Act and in the Code Bill.

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Direct Taxes Code Bill, 2010 versus Income Tax Act, 1961: A Comparison of Certain Aspects

In an earlier post , I had highlighted some observations of the Bombay High Court in Re Organon, and had commented on whether the decision of the Single Judge in that case stood easily along with the observations of a Division Bench in Sandvik.

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Andhra Pradesh High Court on Reduction of Capital: More Uncertainty?

In an important fallout of the Satyam controversy, the Supreme Court , earlier this month, reiterated the law on the amendment of section 34 applications, and also clarified the kinds of fraud that would justify the setting aside of arbitral awards on grounds of public policy.

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Fraud and the amendment of a section 34 application

Manoj Mitta’s excellent article on how Supreme Court betrayed the Orissa tribals made me read in full Chief Justice Kapadia’s 2008 Justice J.K.Mathur Memorial Lecture . Readers may draw their own conclusions

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"In Orissa, there are tribes which are living on grass"

The Rajya Sabha is likely to take up the Torture Bill for consideration and passing sometime early next week. We have documented the various flaws in this Bill previously on this blog (see also, here and Siddharth Varadarajan’s piece in the Hindu yesterday )

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Bill Watch: Rajya Sabha is discussing Torture Bill

Shekhar Hattangadi’s recent piece on the Bombay High Court’s judgment explains why justice has not been meted out to the Khairlanji victims, and how the judgment ignores “multiple motive” concept in criminology. It also points to the dilemma of human rights activists, as the judgment has commuted the death sentence awarded to the convicts by the trial court.

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Analysing the Khairlanji verdict

Frontline’s recent issue is a celebration of the strengths of the Right to Information Act, and a critique of its flaws, as the activists see it. There are 10 components to the cover story, of which I have written three. Though the readers may find all the contributions informative, I’m linking my articles, for the purpose of record, and of course, to invite feedback

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Dissecting the Right to Information Act

A group of Ethiopian and Somali refugee students who allegedly received inadequate educational services from an alternative high school in Minneapolis are not entitled to relief under federal and state civil rights laws, a federal appeals court has ruled. Thirteen students who attended Abraham Lincoln High School, an alternative school run by a private group under contract to the Minneapolis school district, sued under the federal Equal Educational Opportunities Act of 1974, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and a Minnesota civil-rights law.

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Refugee Students in Minneapolis Lose Court Battle

Vedanta’s takeover offer for Cairn Energy has raised some questions because it comes in the wake of impending changes to the SEBI Takeover Regulations that may make it potentially difficult for acquirers to structure transactions.

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Deal-making and a Changing Legal Regime

(We have received the following Call for Submissions from the Indian Journal of Law and Technology ) The Indian Journal of Law and Technology (IJLT) is an annual law journal published by the Law and Technology Committee of the Student Bar Association, at the National Law School of India University, Bangalore, India. IJLT is the first and only law journal in India specifically devoted to the field of technology law. The previous issues of IJLT have featured articles by distinguished authors such as Christoph Antons, Yochai Benkler, Donald S.

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Call for Submissions: Indian Journal of Law and Technology

An earlier post had discussed a Reserve Bank of India (RBI) proposal on regulation of Core Investment Companies; and had discussed the draft guidelines which the RBI had proposed. The RBI has now released the ‘Regulatory Framework for Core Investment Companies’. A Core Investment Company (CIC) is defined as being an NBFC carrying on the business of acquisition of shares and securities which satisfies the following conditions: i.

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RBI: Regulatory Framework on Core Investment Companies

As we have been constantly focusing on this Blog ( here , here and here ), public sector enterprises (PSEs) in India that are substantially owned by the Government often take advantage of relaxations and special dispensations from the applicability of securities laws and corporate governance norms that otherwise apply in their entirety to their private sector counterparts. Even where actions have been initiated by regulators, they have been dropped. For instance, about two years ago when SEBI required PSEs to comply with minimum requirements for appointment of independent directors, the action was not pursued because the PSEs argued that the appointment was beyond their control as it required (under their respective articles of association) the approval of the President of India, which was not forthcoming

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Governments as Issuers of Securities

Five judges of the United Kingdom Supreme Court are scheduled to hear an exceedingly interesting case on October 5 and 6, 2010, on what the Court of Appeal describes in the impugned judgment as a “ short, but quite basic company law point ”. The judgment of the Court of Appeal in the case – Progress Property v.

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Unlawful Distribution of Capital: The Question of Intent

A state education commissioner’s decision to alter an advisory curriculum guide on genocide and human rights in response to political pressure did not violated the First Amendment, a federal appeals court has ruled. The case involves a Massachusetts curriculum guide released in 1999, a year after the passage of a state law that required the state board of education to “formulate recommendations on curricular material on genocide and human rights issues, and guidelines for the teaching of such material.” Then-Education Commissioner David P.

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Court Rejects Challenge to Curriculum Guide on Genocide

We are very pleased to publish the following guest post from Arghya Sengupta, member of the Pre-Legislative Briefing Service. —————————————————————————– Prashant, Sanhita, Shivprasad and I started The Pre-Legislative Briefing Service (PLBS) with a view to proactively engage with the law-making process, by ensuring that parliamentary legislation is constitutionally sound, and in harmony with judicial precedent, international best practices and prevailing statutes. We felt that legislative drafting in India would be benefited by intensively researched academic analyses, which could draw attention both to relevant international precedents and practice in this regard as well as municipal laws and practices which needed to be accounted for before legislation was passed

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Guest Post: The Pre-Legislative Briefing Service (PLBS) – ‘Building India one Bill at a time’

The Socio-Legal Review (SLR) is a student-edited, peer-reviewed interdisciplinary journal published annually by the Law and Society Committee of the National Law School of India University, Bangalore. The Journal aims to be a forum that involves, promotes and engages students and scholars to express and share their ideas and opinions on themes and methodologies relating to the interface of law and society.

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Call For Papers: Socio-Legal Review (SLR) of NLS