Role of judicial education in India

The varied activities undertaken by Judicial Education institutes make it difficult to give a universal definition to the term ‘Judicial Education’. The article argues that Judicial Education is an indispensable tool and proceeds to describe a number of inter‐connected activities falling within the remit of Judicial Education in India.     

Globalisation of the judicial education discourse

This paper focuses on the globalisation phenomenon and how it changed the judicial profession throughout the world. It illustrates how the supra-national judicial system came into being, how access to supra-national judicial authorities started undermining the relevance of domestic judicial systems, why such access is becoming more common and why citizens are increasingly approaching these authorities. The paper explores how an increasingly globalised world is making jurisdiction an irrelevant issue for entertaining claims/conflicts from around the world, what the future holds for national judicial systems in an era of superiority of supra-national judicial institutions, and how to develop judicial education further so as to help national judiciaries sustain faith in them. The utility of global alliances and partnerships in the development of judicial education and how they may strengthen the national judicial systems are also discussed.     

Need for standardizing performance evaluation criteria for judicial magistrates in India

This article, after deliberating on utility of performance evaluation (PE) for the judiciary and practices developed in different jurisdictions for PE, examines existing rules on PE of magistrates in India. From these rules, effectiveness and utility of criteria formulated for PE of magistrates by different high courts is mapped to show their shortcomings, and suggestions are provided for improvement. The article relies on the results of a survey among 35 senior district judges to understand how evaluators see their role in the PE. In the end, some suggestions are offered for reforming the existing system of PE – like delinking it from annual confidential reports, establishing independent commission for PE, adopting transparency in PE, widening gap between two evaluations and making PE as a deciding factor for upward career mobility of magistrates.     

The Geographies of Exclusion and the Politics of Inclusion: Race-based Exclusions in the Teaching of International Relations

In this essay, we argue that race has yet to be integrated as an analytical category shaping the study and teaching of international relations. We suggest that although the issues of race and gender are systematically coded into central concepts in the discipline, they are made invisible through a "series of ontological and epistemological maneuvers." Focusing on two concepts central to the discipline—sovereignty and the nation-state—we suggest that race can be better integrated into the teaching of international relations by focusing on the ways in which these maneuvers structure the geographies and politics of exclusion and inclusion in international relations. We conclude that raising questions about the ways in which race is taught in the academy is in itself critical—what we teach, how we teach, and who teaches are all questions that need repeated airing for achieving interpretative autonomy as well as a transformative politics.