With Anand Swamy (Williams College), University of Chicago Press, 2016 and 2022
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/L/bo24214020.html
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/L/bo110705047.html
Economists often complain about the dysfunctional Indian legal system, and attribute it to colonial rule. What is the colonial legacy? How much of present-day law, as pertaining to economic activity, is really colonial in origin?
Law and the Economy in a Young Democracy argues that the answer to this question varies by type of economic activity. We need to tell different stories for land, credit, common property, environment, labour, corporate law, and personal law.
The second book takes that project to the postcolonial times. Land rights were already opaque and poorly documented by the end of the colonial period. This made land reforms difficult. But land reforms in turn introduced restrictions on transfer and type of use that encouraged subterfuge and reduced transparency.
Starting in the late 19th century the Raj became skeptical of private lending, believing that the sophisticated lender would use legal devices to cheat the naïve borrower. Regulation and suppression of the private moneylender greatly intensified in independent India.
The Raj assumed rights over all land, including forests, that was not explicitly privately owned. The postcolonial developmental state had the same stance for the first two decades after independence. Political mobilization and protest eventually led to new legislation.
Much of Indian environmental law is not of colonial origin and is a response to present-day challenges like pollution. An activist judiciary has adopted globally prevalent ideas such as the Precautionary Principle and Sustainable Development.
With labour law, the basic framework was a colonial inheritance, but regulatory obstacles to redeploying labour were added later, partly in reaction to bankruptcy in textiles, which the industrialization policy discriminated against.
In corporate law, again, the framework was colonial but legislation from the 1960s were driven by postcolonial needs, again a reaction to inequality and bankruptcy. After liberalization, company and corporate governance laws were rewritten, still a work in progress.
Colonial law had framed succession and inheritance of property around religious law, which entailed discrimination. From before independence case law and legislation created a secular reference, it expanded after 1947, if messily and against many challenges.