61 min listen
Mayur R. Suresh, "Terror Trials: Life and Law in Delhi's Courts" (Fordham UP, 2022)
FromNew Books in Law
Mayur R. Suresh, "Terror Trials: Life and Law in Delhi's Courts" (Fordham UP, 2022)
FromNew Books in Law
ratings:
Length:
50 minutes
Released:
Jul 30, 2023
Format:
Podcast episode
Description
In Terror Trials: Life and Law in Delhi's Courts (Fordham UP, 2022), Mayur Suresh shows how legal procedures and technicalities become the modes through which courtrooms are made habitable. Where India’s terror trials have come to be understood by way of the expansion of the security state and displays of Hindu nationalism, Suresh elaborates how they are experienced by defendants in a quite different way, through a minute engagement with legal technicalities.
Amidst the grinding terror trials—which are replete with stories of torture, illegal detention and fabricated charges—defendants school themselves in legal procedures, became adept petition writers, build friendships with police officials, cultivate cautious faith in the courts and express a deep sense of betrayal when this trust is belied. Though seemingly mundane, legal technicalities are fraught and highly contested, and acquire urgent ethical qualities in the life of a trial: the file becomes a space in which the world can be made or unmade, the petition a way of imagining a future, and investigative and courtroom procedures enable the unexpected formation of close relationships between police and terror-accused.
In attending to the ways in which legal technicalities are made to work in everyday interactions among lawyers, judges, accused terrorists, and police, Suresh shows how human expressiveness, creativity and vulnerability emerge through the law.
Shatakshi Singh is a PhD student in Political Science at the University of California Santa Cruz. Her research focuses on legal mobilization and claim-making within the context of dispossession and evictions of urban slums in India. Twitter. Email: ssing176@ucsc.edu.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law
Amidst the grinding terror trials—which are replete with stories of torture, illegal detention and fabricated charges—defendants school themselves in legal procedures, became adept petition writers, build friendships with police officials, cultivate cautious faith in the courts and express a deep sense of betrayal when this trust is belied. Though seemingly mundane, legal technicalities are fraught and highly contested, and acquire urgent ethical qualities in the life of a trial: the file becomes a space in which the world can be made or unmade, the petition a way of imagining a future, and investigative and courtroom procedures enable the unexpected formation of close relationships between police and terror-accused.
In attending to the ways in which legal technicalities are made to work in everyday interactions among lawyers, judges, accused terrorists, and police, Suresh shows how human expressiveness, creativity and vulnerability emerge through the law.
Shatakshi Singh is a PhD student in Political Science at the University of California Santa Cruz. Her research focuses on legal mobilization and claim-making within the context of dispossession and evictions of urban slums in India. Twitter. Email: ssing176@ucsc.edu.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law
Released:
Jul 30, 2023
Format:
Podcast episode
Titles in the series (100)
Leila Schneps and Coralie Colmez, “Math on Trial” (Basic Books, 2013): You may well have seen “Numb3rs,” a TV show in which mathematicians help solve crimes. It’s fiction. But, as Leila Schneps and Coralie Colmez show in their eye-opening new book Math on Trial: How Numbers Get Used and Abused in the Court Room (Basic Boo... by New Books in Law