Faculty Coordinator: Dr. Banu Vasudevan, assisted by Ms. Isha Kaluskar
The ILS History Club has been established for the first time in the 94 years of the history of the ILS Law College.
Aims and objectives:
- To encourage the students of law to take a pride and interest in our legacy, be it the Legal history, Political history, Constitutional history, Social and Economic history or the Religious history of India.
- To connect and correlate the interdependence of Law with History and thereby to make the study of law and the legal institutions more interesting.
- To reckon the need and purpose of including History as an integral part of LLB and BA LLB Courses.by the Bar Council of India.
- Increase an awareness of the significance and utility of the subject of legal history.
- Utilization of the historic materials and sources with advantage for the furtherance of legal study.
Context:
Most of the Legal institutions in India, in the present day, be it the court system or the laws and statutes, the legislative procedures, the jurisprudence, the Bar and the Bench and concepts like democracy, separation of powers, rule of law, judicial process, precedents, etc take their roots in the deep past. Therefore, it becomes even more imperative to understand the history or the past to appreciate the present in their true perspective.
A student of law who aspires to be an advocate, a jurist, legislator or an academician in the future may not play a successful part in the social engineering if he were to imbibe legal knowledge merely as a mechanical learning of law as a body of rules or policy from the theoretical or academic point of law, for he would never know why or how they were evolved and what were the challenges faced in the course of their evolution, growth and development.
Practice:
The History Club commenced with the first meeting of the students on 7th December 2017. There were 54 students in all from both First LL. B and Second B.A. LL.B. On 22 December 2017, a successful attempt was made to bring to life the entire trial and proceedings of Sardar Bhagat Singh. History was used as a platform to reconnect not only the struggle for independence but also to dramatize the courtroom scenes and the understanding of the rationale behind the judgements and the laws that were applied during the British period.
The second activity of the ILS History Club was a Debate Competition, held on 12 January 2018. The topics for debate included: Ideology of the British in enacting Section 124A of IPC on Sedition in the Pre-Independence Period, Section 377 of IPC on LGBT relationship in the Pre-Independence Period and Section 309 of IPC on Attempt to commit Suicide in the Pre-Independence Period, and the relevance of such laws today. For and Against. This activity gives an insight to the students about the development of judicial process, judicial creativity and judicial activism as well as legislative procedure in India before and after the advent of the era of codification after 1858.
The third activity which was held on 19 January 2018 included an active Group Discussion on the current issue ‘Aadhaar or no Aadhaar, whether Aadhaar violates an individual’s Right to Privacy.’