Indian Litigation and Discourse on Points of Law

Algorithms and Big Tech There has been a movement to force Big Tech to reveal their algorithms. To answer why you show X above Y for a particular search query. Courts, till now have more or less shied away from prospects of such compulsion. However, in one of the first cases, a Japanese court asked a hotel booking website to disclose their algorithm when a hotel owner alleged the booking website of giving biased results. Similar demands have been made in other parts of the world. European Union has been deliberating on an act regulating algorithms: the Digital Services Act. That will essentially compel tech Companies to reveal their algorithms to users (and not merely regulators). China passed a new set of regulations this year which gave users the right to opt out of algorithm-driven feed. The regulations stipulate that tech companies have to inform users in a conspicuous way if any algorithms are being used to push content to them. And, if yes they have the option to opt out of targe...

  OBJECTIONS TO DOBBS V. JACKSON (OVERRULING ROE V. WADE ) ON FIRST PRINCIPLES (Here is an attempt to counter certain primary arguments in the United States case Dobbs v. Jackson (the case which overruled Roe v. Wade ). The exercise is to attack them on first principles and not so much on precedents.) 1.   Case of Democratic Process "Like the infamous decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, Roe was also egregiously wrong and on a collision course with the Constitution from the day it was decided. Casey perpetuated its errors, calling both sides of the national controversy to resolve their debate, but in doing so, Casey necessarily declared a winning side. Those on the losing side—those who sought to advance the State’s interest in fetal life—could no longer seek to persuade their elected representatives to adopt policies consistent with their views. The Court short-circuited the democratic process by closing it to the large number of Americans who disagreed with Roe." Argument...

Force Majeure, Parade of Horribles, and Zombie Apocalypse Ken Adams  in one of his blogs about Force Majeure provisions wrote that lawyers tend to throw every possible word to deal with the uncertainties of the future(link in the comments). He termed it a ‘parade of horribles’ and argued that keeping mindlessly adding to the list does more harm than good as the other party can find holes in the definition to prevent liability. The contract below illustrates the issue well. One of the grounds is Zombie Apocalypse. What if there is only a Zombie occupation affecting the use of services? Will it not be covered since apocalypse is specified? Will you wait for the WHO declaration of the apocalypse? The problem with the 'parade of horribles' approach is that the horribles lack specificity and throw a lot of balls in court’s courts. Pun intended. A better way is to keep the Force Majeure Clause general and insert carve-outs where you do not wish the parties to enjoy the benefit of For...

I fail to understand how the two tweets were not scandalous to the court. What else is contempt of the court if not attributing the 'destruction of democracy' to the 'last four CJIs' with a plain face in a microblogging site that reaches millions of people in seconds? A litigant is certainly entitled to criticize the court for a judgment or a series of judgements but to attribute the entire destruction of the political system to the Cheif Justices-en masse on Twitter, in my   little understanding of the law, is clearly not criticism. I am yet to read the entire judgment but it partly says that there was summer vacation of the SC when the CJI was riding the bike and hence the court was not kept in lockdown as alleged in the tweet. If this is the case, then the tweet is an absolutely scandalous lie. Most of the Twitter users would not go to check if the SC was in summer vacation. They read it and move on. Believing that the entire judiciary is corrupt. How will it not be ...

( I braved an attempt to publish a paper in my 2nd year of law school in Harvard law journal. I failed.) What is genocide? The term was originated in 1940s by Polish lawyer Raphel Lemkin in his book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe to describe the 'killing of individuals for the groups they belong to'. He defined genocide as "a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves." [1] . In resolution 96 (I) of 1 December 1946 entitled 'The crime of genocide', the UN General Assembly affirmed that genocide was a crime- and implicitly a crime in its own right, since the label 'crime against humanity' was not used-under customary law. [2] The Convention was signed on 9 December 1948. The definition of genocide as laid down in the 1948 Genocide Convention includes three main elements, namely: i) the intent to destroy in whole o...