Pub Date : 2023-02-01DOI: 10.35295/osls.iisl/0000-0000-0000-1332
Nihar Sashittal
The dominant narrative on caste today asserts that the people belonging to the Scheduled Castes or “Dalits” and Scheduled Tribes or “Tribals” face pervasive and disproportionately more violence. The situation is considered further accentuated by the alleged “caste bias” against these communities in the police and the judiciary. The stringent legal provisions passed by the Indian Parliament, specifically to address crimes against these communities, have been presented as ineffectual or insufficient in curbing this violence. The official crime statistics are often cited as supporting these claims. However, a closer look at this data on crimes against SCs and STs, including the rates of crimes, court convictions and pendency, shows that these popular claims are not based on the evidence that the data provides. Further, a scrutiny of the claims itself reveals serious conceptual problems, fallacies, and errors. This article, while analyzing the currently available data on crimes against SCs and STs, also traces the source of the problems that have marred their understanding and interpretation. We specifically look at the evolution of the word ‘atrocity’ in the context of caste, how the term acquired a strange definition, how it came to mediate the understanding of caste violence and the collection of crime statistics, and how its usage is incredibly loaded to prove the point that there is excessive violence against SCs and STs.
{"title":"The enigma of caste atrocities: Do scheduled castes and scheduled tribes face excessive violence in India?","authors":"Nihar Sashittal","doi":"10.35295/osls.iisl/0000-0000-0000-1332","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.35295/osls.iisl/0000-0000-0000-1332","url":null,"abstract":"The dominant narrative on caste today asserts that the people belonging to the Scheduled Castes or “Dalits” and Scheduled Tribes or “Tribals” face pervasive and disproportionately more violence. The situation is considered further accentuated by the alleged “caste bias” against these communities in the police and the judiciary. The stringent legal provisions passed by the Indian Parliament, specifically to address crimes against these communities, have been presented as ineffectual or insufficient in curbing this violence. The official crime statistics are often cited as supporting these claims. However, a closer look at this data on crimes against SCs and STs, including the rates of crimes, court convictions and pendency, shows that these popular claims are not based on the evidence that the data provides. Further, a scrutiny of the claims itself reveals serious conceptual problems, fallacies, and errors. This article, while analyzing the currently available data on crimes against SCs and STs, also traces the source of the problems that have marred their understanding and interpretation. We specifically look at the evolution of the word ‘atrocity’ in the context of caste, how the term acquired a strange definition, how it came to mediate the understanding of caste violence and the collection of crime statistics, and how its usage is incredibly loaded to prove the point that there is excessive violence against SCs and STs.","PeriodicalId":36457,"journal":{"name":"Onati Socio-Legal Series","volume":"15 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135704713","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-02-01DOI: 10.35295/osls.iisl/0000-0000-0000-1318
Dunkin Jalki
When we talk about the caste system today, among other things, we talk about the wily, crafty and the boasting Brahmins who founded and maintained a set of self-serving rules that effectively took the form of the caste system. How do social scientists know about these Brahmins? As a set of new scholars are demonstrating today, the ancient Indian texts - such as the Vedas or the Mahabharata - do not talk about the caste system or the rule-setting priestly class of Brahmins. These texts do not even exhibit an impulse to put into place a system that even remotely resembles the so-called caste system. Whence is this idea of Brahmin then? Ever since Wilhelm Halbfass’s Imagining India (1990), a growing but a small number of Indologists talk about the 11th century Al-Bīrūnī as one of “the greatest scholars ever” to speak about the Indian caste system. There is, however, neither a comprehensive study to show what his contributions measure up to nor any attempt to dig into the Islamic culture that culminates in Al-Biruni’s quite detailed picture of the Brahmin and the caste system. This paper sifts through the earliest available Islamic writings on India, from the early 8th century to Al-Biruni’s time, to chart a genealogy of the figure of the law-making crafty Brahmin that we confront by the 11th century in Muslim writings.
{"title":"Evolution of the figure of the Brahmin in early Muslim writings","authors":"Dunkin Jalki","doi":"10.35295/osls.iisl/0000-0000-0000-1318","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.35295/osls.iisl/0000-0000-0000-1318","url":null,"abstract":"When we talk about the caste system today, among other things, we talk about the wily, crafty and the boasting Brahmins who founded and maintained a set of self-serving rules that effectively took the form of the caste system. How do social scientists know about these Brahmins? As a set of new scholars are demonstrating today, the ancient Indian texts - such as the Vedas or the Mahabharata - do not talk about the caste system or the rule-setting priestly class of Brahmins. These texts do not even exhibit an impulse to put into place a system that even remotely resembles the so-called caste system. Whence is this idea of Brahmin then? Ever since Wilhelm Halbfass’s Imagining India (1990), a growing but a small number of Indologists talk about the 11th century Al-Bīrūnī as one of “the greatest scholars ever” to speak about the Indian caste system. There is, however, neither a comprehensive study to show what his contributions measure up to nor any attempt to dig into the Islamic culture that culminates in Al-Biruni’s quite detailed picture of the Brahmin and the caste system. This paper sifts through the earliest available Islamic writings on India, from the early 8th century to Al-Biruni’s time, to chart a genealogy of the figure of the law-making crafty Brahmin that we confront by the 11th century in Muslim writings.","PeriodicalId":36457,"journal":{"name":"Onati Socio-Legal Series","volume":"42 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136062621","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-02-01DOI: 10.35295/osls.iisl/0000-0000-0000-1372
Prakash Shah
Starting with an individual report in a leading British periodical of higher education, this article fans outwards to show how the contemporary field of caste studies reflects the degeneracy of its methods and claims. Rather than producing knowledge about India and the so-called caste system, caste studies has worked itself into a corner by creating a set of imagined victims and perpetrators of caste oppression, atrocities, violence and discrimination, and by making unsustainable claims on legal systems and other institutions. The manifold and insurmountable problems of contemporary caste studies include its basis in the European framework for the study of India founded upon Christian theological claims, the carry-over of this account into the secularised humanities and social sciences, and its engagement in corrupted academic practices of the kind that typify grievance studies today. That an alternative account exists in the form of the research programme of SN Balagangadhara, which inspires the articles in this special issue, is good reason for rethinking and revision of the field.
{"title":"Caste studies today: Imaginary victims and perpetrators","authors":"Prakash Shah","doi":"10.35295/osls.iisl/0000-0000-0000-1372","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.35295/osls.iisl/0000-0000-0000-1372","url":null,"abstract":"Starting with an individual report in a leading British periodical of higher education, this article fans outwards to show how the contemporary field of caste studies reflects the degeneracy of its methods and claims. Rather than producing knowledge about India and the so-called caste system, caste studies has worked itself into a corner by creating a set of imagined victims and perpetrators of caste oppression, atrocities, violence and discrimination, and by making unsustainable claims on legal systems and other institutions. The manifold and insurmountable problems of contemporary caste studies include its basis in the European framework for the study of India founded upon Christian theological claims, the carry-over of this account into the secularised humanities and social sciences, and its engagement in corrupted academic practices of the kind that typify grievance studies today. That an alternative account exists in the form of the research programme of SN Balagangadhara, which inspires the articles in this special issue, is good reason for rethinking and revision of the field.","PeriodicalId":36457,"journal":{"name":"Onati Socio-Legal Series","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47136404","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.35295/osls.iisl/0000-0000-0000-1392
B. Bello
The contribution delves into some main implications of the current soft and hard legal framework related to the Internet governance for tackling online hate speech, from the perspective of legal and social actors based in the European Union. Given the dynamic constellation characterised by centripetal trends towards UN-fostered international governance, Council of Europe and EU soft and hard legal instruments, co-existing with centrifugal forces of national legislations, the article explores how inter-legality may contribute tackling online hate speech in today’s fast changing and complex legal scenario. Hence, due to the lack of a universally recognised definition of hate speech and a global regulation of online communication, inter-legality may be operationalised in still unexplored places – that is, not only by judges but by lawmakers, independent authorities on communication, and even platforms.
{"title":"Tackling online hate speech from a European perspective: Potentials and challenges of inter-legality","authors":"B. Bello","doi":"10.35295/osls.iisl/0000-0000-0000-1392","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.35295/osls.iisl/0000-0000-0000-1392","url":null,"abstract":"The contribution delves into some main implications of the current soft and hard legal framework related to the Internet governance for tackling online hate speech, from the perspective of legal and social actors based in the European Union. Given the dynamic constellation characterised by centripetal trends towards UN-fostered international governance, Council of Europe and EU soft and hard legal instruments, co-existing with centrifugal forces of national legislations, the article explores how inter-legality may contribute tackling online hate speech in today’s fast changing and complex legal scenario. Hence, due to the lack of a universally recognised definition of hate speech and a global regulation of online communication, inter-legality may be operationalised in still unexplored places – that is, not only by judges but by lawmakers, independent authorities on communication, and even platforms.","PeriodicalId":36457,"journal":{"name":"Onati Socio-Legal Series","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"70042409","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-12-23DOI: 10.35295/osls.iisl/0000-0000-0000-1371
Antonio Peña Jumpa
This paper deals with communal justice or indigenous justice governed by Convention No. 169 of the International Labour Organization (ILO). Article 9 of the indicated Convention is analysed describing and commenting on the different aspects or assumptions it contains about communal or indigenous justice. Likewise, this content is analysed in the doctrine and in the author’s field experience. The central question that guides the work is: How does the International Convention No. 169 of the International Labour Organization regulate communal or Indigenous justice? The answer is made through the verification of a hypothesis that raises the limits of the Article 9 of Convention 169 to understand and regulate communal or indigenous justice that is practiced in indigenous communities or peoples.
{"title":"Community-based justice or indigenous justice in international law: Analysis of Article 9 of ILO Convention 169","authors":"Antonio Peña Jumpa","doi":"10.35295/osls.iisl/0000-0000-0000-1371","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.35295/osls.iisl/0000-0000-0000-1371","url":null,"abstract":"This paper deals with communal justice or indigenous justice governed by Convention No. 169 of the International Labour Organization (ILO). Article 9 of the indicated Convention is analysed describing and commenting on the different aspects or assumptions it contains about communal or indigenous justice. Likewise, this content is analysed in the doctrine and in the author’s field experience. The central question that guides the work is: How does the International Convention No. 169 of the International Labour Organization regulate communal or Indigenous justice? The answer is made through the verification of a hypothesis that raises the limits of the Article 9 of Convention 169 to understand and regulate communal or indigenous justice that is practiced in indigenous communities or peoples.","PeriodicalId":36457,"journal":{"name":"Onati Socio-Legal Series","volume":"9 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-12-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"70042471","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-12-22DOI: 10.35295/osls.iisl/0000-0000-0000-1286
Johannes Feest
{"title":"A penologist in the Basque Country: Reminiscences by Johannes Feest","authors":"Johannes Feest","doi":"10.35295/osls.iisl/0000-0000-0000-1286","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.35295/osls.iisl/0000-0000-0000-1286","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":36457,"journal":{"name":"Onati Socio-Legal Series","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-12-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47001706","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-12-22DOI: 10.35295/osls.iisl/0000-0000-0000-1294
Ratno Lukito
{"title":"Continuity and change in law: Confabulating misyar marriages in Indonesia","authors":"Ratno Lukito","doi":"10.35295/osls.iisl/0000-0000-0000-1294","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.35295/osls.iisl/0000-0000-0000-1294","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":36457,"journal":{"name":"Onati Socio-Legal Series","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-12-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47705069","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-12-22DOI: 10.35295/osls.iisl/0000-0000-0000-1285
U. Schultz
{"title":"Breaking the Bowl: Integrating women’s gender and socio-legal issues into teaching and research in law","authors":"U. Schultz","doi":"10.35295/osls.iisl/0000-0000-0000-1285","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.35295/osls.iisl/0000-0000-0000-1285","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":36457,"journal":{"name":"Onati Socio-Legal Series","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-12-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48858245","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-12-22DOI: 10.35295/osls.iisl/0000-0000-0000-1292
J. Woodlock
{"title":"Arbitrators of safety and authors of law – Legal consciousness, normative pluralism and modulated derogation among European licensed aircraft maintenance engineers","authors":"J. Woodlock","doi":"10.35295/osls.iisl/0000-0000-0000-1292","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.35295/osls.iisl/0000-0000-0000-1292","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":36457,"journal":{"name":"Onati Socio-Legal Series","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-12-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48479595","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-12-22DOI: 10.35295/osls.iisl/0000-0000-0000-1295
L. Zevounou
{"title":"From a French minority point of view: Perspectives on socio-legal studies in Europe","authors":"L. Zevounou","doi":"10.35295/osls.iisl/0000-0000-0000-1295","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.35295/osls.iisl/0000-0000-0000-1295","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":36457,"journal":{"name":"Onati Socio-Legal Series","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-12-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48082844","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}