1st Edition
Sociolegal Challenges for the Social Justice Continuum Perspectives from India and South Africa
As legal jurisdictions in the Global South, both India and South Africa have long histories of inequality and structural oppression. This book engages in comparative socio-legal analysis to examine the contours of social justice in both countries.
It explores the role of law as an instrument for social change in the face of persistent conditions of injustice, discrimination, social exclusion, and socioeconomic vulnerabilities. The book addresses newly emerging socio-legal challenges for the social justice continuum in a neoliberal era. Focussing on four key themes, it explores:
· the challenges for labour law and social security including informalisation, climate change, and migrancy;
· law, technology, and social justice, with a focus on the role that emerging technologies often play to ameliorate or exacerbate social exclusion;
· sexual orientation, gender, and substantive equality, grappling with the disjuncture between law and lived realities; and
· pedagogical approaches to legal education and social justice lawyering.
Lucid and illuminating, this book will be of interest to academics, researchers, legal practitioners and social actors who are exploring legal strategies and developments to tackle comparative social justice challenges, especially in the Global South.
List of Contributors. List of Abbreviations. Preface. Introduction Part I: Challenges for labour law and social security – informalisation, migration and climate change 1. The vulnerability of migrant workers in South Africa 2. Changing trends and challenges of employment and social security for gig workers’ rights in India 3. Legal regulation, the burgeoning informal economy, and protection of vulnerable women workers in South Africa 4. Natural calamities, structural inequalities, and internal migration in India: a case study of Chennai floods 5. Climate change, migration and transformative justice: Towards an ethics of practice Part II: Law, technology, and social justice 6. Technology as ‘trans-individuation’: Aadhaar and the question of institutional responsibility 7. Microinsurance and the role of digitalisation as a means of social justice for vulnerable people 8. Strengthening informal cross-border traders cooperatives for equitable digital trade Part III: Sexual orientation, gender, and substantive equality 9. Engendering change: LGBTQIA+ rights and positive measures in South Africa 10. Exploring social justice strategies for LGBTQIA+ persons in India 11. The case for a gender-neutral law on sexual harassment in the workplace in India 12. An assessment of South Africa’s compliance with CEDAW through the shattered lens of gender-based violence against black lesbians 13. Advancing socio-economic rights in response to gender-based violence in South Africa Part IV: Pedagogical approaches to legal education and social justice lawyering 14. How to make legal education and research more democratic in a neoliberal era – a lifetime of questions? 15. Pre-law education: promoting democratic citizenship 16. Legal education and ethics: a road towards social justice 17. Nurturing CHAMPS for social justice lawyering through Adaptive Clinical Andragogy. Index.
Biography
Varsha Bhagat-Ganguly has been a professor with Institute of Law, Nirma University and CRS, LBSNAA, Mussoorie and a fellow with Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, India.
Meghan Finn is a senior lecturer at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa.
