Law and Society in Modern India.

• Author: Rocher, Ludo

This volume contains a collection of thirteen articles by Marc Galanter, the Evuje-Bascom Professor of Law at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and one of the most, if not the most, prolific writers on modern Indian law and law-related topics in the United States. Ten of these articles appeared earlier, between 1967 and 1986, "in scattered publications, most not readily available in India, |which~ means that they reached few among those for whom they were written." Three articles are new and were written specifically for this volume: "Missed Opportunities: The Use and Non-use of Law Favourable to Untouchables and Other Specially Vulnerable Groups," "New Patterns of Legal Services in India," and "Epilogue: Will Justice Be Done?"

The "Epilogue" is a very personal piece, both interesting and disquieting. It is interesting because Galanter reflects on his more than thirty-year-long contact with India, from the time when, in 1957, one year after graduating from law school, he went to India to study the abolition of untouchability: "I encountered a world vastly different than my training |in an American law school~ had led me to expect or equipped me to deal with," and he talks about the many lessons which the study of law and justice in India taught him. He refers to the fortunate fact that, since the time when he started his research, "there has grown up a vigorous scholarly community devoted to social research on law," but he is silent on the pivotal role which he himself played in having a sizable section of that community focus its research on India. On the other hand, he rightly draws attention to the less fortunate fact that, even after Independence, "legal intercourse between India and the United States has been heavily one-directional." A whole generation of young Indians came to study at our law schools, but, with the exception of the Emergency and the Bhopal disaster, India itself "has been invisible to the American legal academy and to the world of law practice" (ibid.). None of our 200 law schools has a program focusing on India; none of our 6000 law teachers is paid to specialize in Indian law.

The disquiet which I alluded to earlier was not so much caused by the statement in the epilogue that "during the past dozen years, most of my research has been on the United States." Working on American law has not prevented Galanter from continuing to publish on India. His major book, Competing Equalities: Law and the Backward Classes...