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The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the gaping vulnerabilities in the country’s public healthcare system. States struggled to ramp up their healthcare facilities, hospitals were quick to run out of beds, the costs of medical facilities and drugs rose steeply, and many individuals belonging to socio- economically vulnerable communities were unable to access healthcare facilities. Apart from these structural issues, a few specific issues stood out. These very issues are the focus of the XIV NLSIR-Samvad: Partners Symposium. Through this Symposium, we hope to address some of the pressing concerns relating to India's public healthcare system and hope to reconceptualize the country's healthcare framework in a holistic manner.

Courts have favoured a restricted interpretation of section 10 and have limited its application to things said or done during the pendency of the conspiracy. Such interpretation is based on the presumption that section 10 embodies a rule of common responsibility that is based on the theory of agency.

In NLSIR Online’s latest piece, Professor James Jaffe sheds light on the ‘real’ last jury trial in India, which he argues came thirteen years after Commander K. M. Nanavati’s murder trial in September 1959. He states that film, television, and the print media has retained for Bombay’s Nanavati trial, a unique but unwarranted position in legal, historical, and popular lore. Professor Jaffe traces the “real” last jury trial in India to the less glamorous and more dangerous streets of Calcutta to the case of communist activists Prakash Chandra De and his brother Rabindranath, who were tried for the murder of Dipak Sarkar in 1967.

The author argues that ‘ARCs can be resolution applicants within both IBC and SARFAESI frameworks, provided they act within their permitted realm of activities’. In doing so, the piece examines the merits of RBI’s objection by analysing the position of ARCs as resolution applicants under the IBC and SARFAESI framework and concludes that the public discourse is heading in the wrong direction. The question, she says, is not whether an ARC can submit a resolution plan, but what restructuring measures can be resorted to in an ARC’s resolution plan?

The relatively older anti-conversion laws have broadly defined forced conversion as conversion through inducement, force, or other fraudulent means. However, the recent anti-conversion laws enacted by the States of Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, and Uttarakhand also include conversion before and after marriage under the ambit of forced conversion.

This piece argues that the problem of affordable housing in major Indian cities is a function of the legal restrictions on the use of land. Regulatory restrictions inhibit the appropriate use of land for housing in metropolitan cities in India. We argue that in order to increase the affordability of housing in metropolitan cities in India, such restrictions need to be significantly liberalised through appropriate legal modifications.

How should constitutional designers build the rules of constitutional amendment? Surprisingly and unfortunately, scholars have offered few answers to this all-important question. Constitutional designers are instead left with few resources to which they can turn for guidance in constructing the procedures of constitutional change. My recent book on Constitutional Amendments: Making, Breaking, and Changing Constitutions (Oxford University Press, 2019) is an effort to help.

Many countries in the modern world face constitutional changes. Sometimes these changes are related to the formation of a new political system, the transformation of a democracy, or changes in consolidated democracies. Constitutional amendments are a very complex issue, and many important circumstances need to be taken into account in their implementation. Richard Albert's book is the latest brilliant and complex study that shows countries the way in which constitutional amendments should be drafted, adopted, implemented, and under what conditions this process should be based.

By mapping out the intellectual scenery of constitutional amendment rules, Constitutional Amendments: Making, Breaking, and Changing Constitutions offers a remarkable theoretical, doctrinal, and comparative study of the most pressing questions on constitutional change.

The book by Richard Albert on Constitutional Amendments: Making, Breaking and Changing Constitutions is an outstanding achievement, which should not come as a surprise. Albert is one of the most imaginative and prolific authors writing on constitutional change, and his new book does not disappoint. In Constitutional Amendments, Albert comprehensively examines the design of formal amendment rules, informal change, constitutional unamendability, and more.