A brief commotion arose during the hearings for one of twenty-first-century India’s most widely discussed legal disputes, when a dynamic young attorney suggested that deities, too, had constitutional rights. The suggestion was not absurd. Like a human being or a corporation, Hindu temple deities can participate in litigation, incur financial obligations, and own property. There was nothing to suggest, said the attorney, that the same deity who enjoyed many of the rights and obligations accorded to human persons could not also lay claim to some of their constitutional freedoms. The lone justice to consider this claim blandly and briefly observed that having specific legal rights did not perforce endow one with constitutional rights. Nevertheless, a handful of recent and high-profile disputes concerning Hindu temple deities and the growing influence of Hindu nationalist politics together suggest that the issue of deities’ rights is far from a settled matter. This article argues that declining to recognize deities’ constitutional rights accurately reflects dueling commitments in the Indian Constitution.

Among law and society fields, legal anthropology has experienced markedly high highs and low lows. Its parent disciplines, law and anthropology, have fluctuated from intense and productive engagement with one another to mutual disregard for each other’s ways of knowing. Most commentary on the trajectory of this interdisciplinary relationship has bemoaned anthropology’s (ir)relevance to legal scholarship, but this introduction and the symposium essays that follow invert the usual narrative by asking how—and why—formal law might matter to anthropology. The symposium is part of a dual special issue that grows out of a multi-year conversation between legal anthropologists representing varied institutional and intellectual backgrounds. Drawing on that conversation and on the essays it has produced, this introduction argues that anthropologists would do well to abandon their prepositional attitude to formal law and, instead, to build on the strengths of anthropological analysis by “cultivating attentiveness” to things legal.

After more than half a century of law and society scholarship, two recent volumes propose to survey and advance the field. Edited by Mariana Valverde, Kamari Clarke, Even Darian-Smith, and Prabha Kotiswaran, The Routledge Handbook of Law and Society (2021) draws on an international list of contributors to refocus law and society scholarship on fresh topics and themes. The Research Handbook on Modern Legal Realism (2021), edited by Shauhin Talesh, Elizabeth Mertz, and Heinz Klug, presents a comprehensive guide to the New Legal Realism (NLR) movement that emerged from law and society around fifteen years ago. This review essay explores how the volumes’ common call for a more prominent and methodologically diversified social science of law also encourages a renewed attention to the internal logics of legal doctrine.

The Indian Supreme Court has long enjoyed an almost mythic reputation for progressive and creative jurisprudence, but a series of recent scandals is beginning to erode this well-settled authority. One of the most troubling of these incidents has been an allegation of sexual harassment and intimidation by a Court staffer against then sitting Chief Justice of India (CJI) Ranjan Gogoi. This article draws on media analysis and ethnographic research conducted in the immediate aftermath of the “CJI Scandal” to explore what it means for judges and judging in contemporary India. I argue that the justices’ response to the allegations are part of a broader shift in Indian judging. Far from being the product of an institution imbued with mythic qualities, judging in India is increasingly coming to represent an example of mythos, or “an assertive discourse of power and authority … something to be believed and obeyed.”

What happens when courts reach “good” outcomes through “bad” reasoning? Are there limits to consequentialist jurisprudence? The Indian Supreme Court’s recent decision in IYLA v. State of Kerala offers important insights on both issues. IYLA, decided in September 2018, held that the Hindu temple at Sabarimala may not ban women aged ten to fifty from its premises even though devotees argue the exclusion is religiously mandated. Reactions to IYLA have been vehement and violent, and so far only two women in the prohibited age range have managed to visit the temple. Perhaps any outcome impinging on religious practice would have elicited such responses. Nevertheless, the Court’s analysis, which disregarded devotee perspectives in its eagerness to acknowledge the previously overlooked perspectives of women, is problematic insofar as it superficially upholds the Court’s reputation as a progressive institution while creating bad precedent by further damaging the “essential practices” doctrine. This article draws on case law and legal analysis to demonstrate how the Court’s reasoning paid short shrift to its own doctrines and to conflicting imperatives in the Indian Constitution. The Court’s (and ruling’s) failures underscore the extent to which winning good outcomes through bad reasoning should be sobering rather than satisfying.

Secular governance in India was meant to have incorporated religion within public life, but the implementation of ‘Indian secularism’ has in important ways been premised on separating religious and secular lifeworlds. Public Hindu temples, whose assets and operations are managed by a melange of statutory bodies, courts, and state governments, exemplify this puzzling situation. The 2011 discovery of treasures within the Padmanabhaswamy temple in Trivandrum, Kerala, prompted extended public debate about the ownership of temple assets as well as litigation that eventually reached the Supreme Court of India. Indian citizens, erstwhile princely rulers, and the deity of the temple were variously presented as the true owners of the wealth. Ultimately, both public discourse and judicial opinion largely reaffirmed the notion that religious institutions are to be treated as private, contractually defined properties, and that temple wealth, as specifically religious property, exists outside of market circulations.

Indian constitutional framers sought to tie their new state to ideas of modernity and liberalism by creating a government that would ensure citizens' rights while also creating the conditions for democratic citizenship. Balancing these two goals has been particularly challenging with regard to religion, as exemplified by the emergence of a peculiarly Indian understanding of secularism which requires the nonestablishment of religion but not the separation of religion and state. Supporters argue that this brand of secularism is best suited to the particular social and historical circumstances of independent India. This article suggests that the desire to separate religion and state is integral to any understanding of secularism and that, consequently, the Indian state neither is nor was meant to be secular. However, Indian secularists correctly identify the Indian state's distinctive approach to religion-state relations as appropriate to the Indian context and in keeping with India's constitutional goals.