O.P. Jindal Global University, Jindal Global Law School - [JGLS]

About the Centre for Law and Humanities

The Centre for Law and Humanities focuses on the link between legal practice and humanistic perspectives. It aims to question the idea that law is only a tool of power.

The Centre works to recover a sensibility that is literary, lyrical, poetic, sensory, and aesthetic. It invites self-reflexivity at the heart of the legal enterprise.

Core Objectives

The Centre promotes reflections on the intersections between law and the humanities. It initiates interdisciplinary conversations on how to think of law in humanities, law and humanities, and law as humanities.

The Centre provides a forum for scholars from diverse intellectual traditions and disciplinary perspectives. It seeks to deepen law's quest for humanity.

• To interrogate the normalization of law's attachment to cruelty.
• To recover histories, traditions, and forms of life and thought that challenge law as a hollow instrument.
• To bring the idea of the human (or the post-human) and humanity to the centre of constitutional law and human rights law.
• To cultivate sensibilities that enable legal experts, academics, and students to see and feel how lives are made illegible in the shadow of the law.
• To unpack symbolic forms of law and structures of feeling through postcolonial readings of literary, cinematic, poetic, artistic, and sensory traditions.
• To frame law's relationship with caste, gender, politics, identity, morality, art, and justice.
• To address the cultural lives of both state law and non-state law.

Activities and Events

The Centre regularly organises individual and collaborative research projects, conferences, and scholarly symposia. It also hosts public and distinguished lectures and exhibitions.

On 22 November 2024, the Centre collaborated with The Centre for Human Rights Studies to organise a photography exhibition titled Rights and Duties: A Visual Journey. The exhibition presented a curated selection of photographs and visual essays to foster conversations among artists, practitioners, and academics, setting the stage for Constitution Day.

The collection offered a glimpse into the history and contemporary discussions surrounding the Indian Constitution. It celebrated the vibrant and evolving nature of rights and duties under it.

Artwork and Symbolism

The Centre's artwork uses symbols to denote various fields of humanities, including anthropology, law, politics, archaeology, history, literature, linguistic and language, performing arts, visual arts, philosophy, and gender. These symbols rest upon the international symbol of justice, representing how co-dependent law and humanities are on each other.

The artwork shows that absolute justice is abstract and imaginary. It depicts justice as an unachievable dream for the oppressed and poor (shown in green), while justice tilts towards money, power, and authority (shown in red). It also shows how the powerful and the rich hold and play with it recklessly.

The Centre also curated an exhibition on 4 May 2023, curated by CLH Fellows Hamsini Marada and Soumya Singh Chouhan. The artworks showcased myriad intersections of art and law, exploring the unique nature of art as a legal object or subject. The idea was to understand how art is constructed and contested in legal theory and regulation.

Inclusivity Principle

The Centre's work is drawn from the principle that all people, irrespective of nationality, class, gender, religion, economic status, age, disabilities or special abilities, and choices of clothing, should be granted a similar set of privileges. It respects diversity and aims to create an inclusive international society that respects core human values.