P Ishwara Bhat's Law and Social Transformation

Law and Social Transformation, a classic treatise by Dr. P. Ishwara Bhat expertly puts forward optimistic signs of the Indian legal system’s competence to both lead and follow social transformation with an admirable commitment to multiculturalism, empowerment, and sober modernism.

The work is divided into four parts. Part I is a jurisprudential journey of India’s evolution as a rule of law country struggling to build a social order informed by equity, equality, and justice. Part II deals with Religion, Language, Regionalism, and Ethnicity. Part III is devoted to an incisive study of the interaction between law and the Constitution on the one hand and the weaker section of society (women, children, and backward classes) on the other. Part IV is a bold attempt to look at the role of law vis-à-vis several sectors of the polity, the economy, the justice delivery system, and the civil society in the context of modernization and globalization.

This new edition is a method of understanding the working of the Constitution in society in its complexity and dynamism. It is a study of transformative constitutionalism in the day-to-day legal system. The author has included all the recent developments and case laws to date along with a new chapter on the social dimension of law during the pandemics (COVID-19).

This work is sure to inspire further thinking about law and society’s active partnership in social transformation. The book will benefit students and teachers of law and sociology, lawyers, judges, legislators, social activists, NGOs, administrators, policymakers in the government, and the general public of the country.

Extract from the foreword                             

This book mirrors Dr. P. Ishwara Bhat’s hard work, deep commitment, scholarship and learning, research, critical analysis based on a comparative study, facts and the experience gained. It is both a classic and authority on the subject dealt with, and it provides insight, provocation, and scope for further research, study, criticism, and analysis in the years to come. I have good reasons to think that this book will benefit students, teachers, the general public, lawyers, judges, legislators, social activists, NGOs, administrators, and policymakers to move forward suitably and quickly in the area of social transformation …                                        

—Justice Dr. Shivaraj V. Patil, Former Judge, Supreme Court of India