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Terror and Technicalities
Looking for Life in Delhi’s Courts
Speakers
How do people, who are often at the receiving end of legal violence, engage with the law?
Amidst the grinding terror trials – which are replete with stories of torture, illegal detention and fabricated charges – this presentation will discuss how the terror-accused schooled themselves in legal language and came to understand how paperwork’s certificatory procedures produce legal truth. Though seemingly mundane, legal technicalities are fraught and highly contested, and acquire urgent ethical qualities in the life of a trial: legal language becomes a question of a form of life. The file becomes a space in which the world can be made or unmade, and the petition is a way of imagining a future.
In attending to the ways in which legal technicalities are made to work – through legal language and through files – we are offered a way of understanding how human expressiveness, creativity and vulnerability emerge through the law.
Mayur Suresh will give a short talk on the theme followed by a discussion with Leah Verghese and a Q&A with the audience.
Speakers
Mayur Suresh
Dr Mayur Suresh is a Senior Lecturer in Law at SOAS, University of London and has taught at SOAS since 2015. He has degrees from the National Law School of India University, Columbia Law School and Birkbeck, University of London. Mayur‘s research is based on ethnographic fieldwork in terrorism cases that took place in Delhi’s trial courts. His book Terror Trials: Life and Law in Delhi’s Courts (Fordham University Press, 2023) is derived from this research. In 2023 Mayur was awarded the Leverhulme Research Leadership Award for a project that looks at the social life of law in contemporary India.
Leah Verghese
Leah is the Research Manager at DAKSH, a Bengaluru based thinktank working on judicial reforms and access to justice. She is lawyer and social scientist with wide-ranging work experience in corporations, nonprofits and political campaigns across India. She is a graduate of Columbia University and National Law School of India University.
