State of justice in India: issue of social justice Vol.2

This second volume of the series State of Justice in India: Issues of Social Justice focuses on the perennial tension between law and justice. The articles highlight the way law creates dichotomies in its attempt to be a guardian of justice. The authors seek to articulate the idea of a 'justice gap', which must always lie between the claims for justice and the way the dispensation of Justice is organized.

Justice and Law: The Limits of the Deliverables of Law (lind part of a four-part set) opens with two articles on how our legislators engaged with the issues during the course of framing the Constitution. They bring out the inevitability of compromise (between law and justice) in such an exercise. It then moves on to explore the tension over the issue of reservations for scheduled castes, and other backward castes. One article documents the history of reservations in India in the background of political contentions, elections and judicial activism. Another traces how the 'game of justice' gets played in the language of the courts and the law. Both articles indicate that the issue of social justice is closely linked with the expansion of democracy. The last article seeks to measure the limits of the legal system in providing justice to those who have become marginalized on account of their sexual preferences.