What is Reasonable Classification under Indian Law?

It is now well established that while Article 14 of the Constitution of India, 1950, forbids class legislation i.e. based on any class of persons, it does not forbid reasonable classification for the purposes of legislation. The classification may be founded on different bases, geographical or according to objects or occupations. What is necessary is that there should be a nexus between the basis of classification and the object of the Act under consideration.

Express Newspapers v. Union of India 1959 SCR 12 also reported as AIR 1958 SC 578

A similar American judgment is the Lee Optical Case. 

What is Executive Action under Indian Constitution

The expression executive action in Article 166 is comprehensive enough to include orders which emerge as a result of a quasi judicial decision by the Government. This requires ministerial advice. President or governor cannot proceed on his own.

Case Law reference: Automobile Transport v. Nathuram Mirdha AIR 1959 RAJ 121

Debt recovery law faces due-process challenge in Pakistan

By Yasser Latif Hamdani

B.N. Rau, Constitutional Adviser to the Constituent Assembly that was drafting the Constitution of India (“the Indian Constitution”), travelled to the U.S.A, where he met U.S. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter. The latter advised him against including the phrase ‘due process’ in the Indian Constitution, and hence, in 1949, the phrase was not included in the text of the Indian Constitution. Indian courts, however, repeatedly located ‘due process’ in Article 14 of the Indian Constitution instead. One could, without exaggeration, describe the Pakistani legal tradition as India-lite (with a flavour of Islam). The Constitutions of 1956, 1962, and 1973 all avoided the use of the term ‘due process’ in keeping with the Indian tradition. In 2010, when Pakistan’s Parliament passed the Eighteenth Amendment to the Pakistan’s Constitution, a new article - Article 10-A - was introduced. It reads:

“Article 10-A: For the determination of his civil rights and obligations or in any criminal charge against him a person shall be entitled to fair trial and due process.”

Read more here.

Legal Minds of Pakistan

Book recommendation: Before Memory Fades - An Autobiography


By Yasser Latif Hamdani

Any legal scholar picking up jurisprudence in Pakistan would be under the impression that Pakistan and India never separated. The reliance Pakistani jurists, judges and lawyers place on Indian judgements and case law is phenomenal. Indian precedents are not just persuasive – as in the case of English judgements and some American ones – but are given the status of near-law. This is hardly surprising, of course, given that most of the laws in Pakistan and India predate independence and very few, if any, have been updated in Pakistan. What is definite, however, is that Indian jurists and lawyers are certainly far superior as a whole when it comes to expounding law.