Law of India
The legal system of India consists of civil law, common law, customary law, religious law and corporate law within the legal framework inherited from the colonial era and various legislation first introduced by the British are still in effect in modified forms today. Since the drafting of the Indian Constitution, Indian laws also adhere to the United Nations guidelines on human rights law and the environmental law.
Personal law is fairly complex, with each religion adhering to its own specific laws. In most states, registering of marriages and divorces is not compulsory. Separate laws govern Hindus including Sikhs, Jains and Buddhist, Muslims, Christians, Parsis, and followers of other religions. The exception to this rule is in the state of Goa, where a uniform civil code is in place, in which all religions have a common law regarding marriages, divorces, and adoption. On February 7, 2024, the Indian state of Uttarakhand also incorporated a uniform civil code. In the first major reformist judgment for the 2010s, the Supreme Court of India banned the Islamic practice of "Triple Talaq". The landmark Supreme Court of India judgment was welcomed by women's rights activists across India.
, there are about 891 Central laws as per the online repository hosted by the Legislative Department, Ministry of Law and Justice, Government of India. Further, there are many State laws for each state, which can also be accessed from the same repository.
History
represented a distinct tradition of law, and had a historically independent thought of legal theory and practice. The Dharmaśāstras played an important role. The Arthashastra, dating from 400 BC and the Manusmriti, from 100 AD, were influential treatises in India, texts that were considered authoritative legal guidance. Manu's central philosophy was tolerance and pluralism, and was cited across Southeast Asia.Early in this period, which culminated in the creation of the Gupta Empire, relations with ancient Greece and Rome were not infrequent. The appearance of similar fundamental institutions of international law in various parts of the world show that they are inherent in international society, irrespective of culture and tradition. Inter-State relations in the pre-Islamic period resulted in clear-cut rules of warfare of a high humanitarian standard, in rules of neutrality, of treaty law, of customary law embodied in religious charters, in exchange of embassies of a temporary or semi-permanent character.
After the Muslim conquest in the Indian subcontinent, Islamic Sharia law spread with the establishment of Delhi Sultanate, Bengal Sultanate and Gujarat Sultanate.
The Corps of Forty also played a major role by establishing some Turkish law in India.
In the 17th century, when the Mughal Empire became the world's largest economy, its sixth ruler, Aurangzeb, compiled the Fatawa-e-Alamgiri with several Arab and Iraqi Islamic scholars, which served as the main governing body in most parts of South Asia.
With the advent of the British Raj, there was a break in tradition, and Hindu and Islamic law were abolished in favour of British common law. The first royal charter for the East India Company in the 1600s granted them the ability to make laws in order to better govern its “official representatives” in India. This was a power that grew rapidly with the increase in the East India Company's influence and power over India, giving the East India Company a wider and more powerful judicial authority and jurisdiction. During the eighteenth century, the East India Company wanted a more amicable ruling system where they would not have only English Common Law dictating the laws of a state that was not English yet. They opted to have a set of laws and courts in both the interior and exterior governments where the exterior, also known as the Presidencies, was ruled by English Law, staffed by English judges and lawyers, and dealt with Englishmen. The interior, the Mofussil, dealt with native law such as Hindu and Muslim personal law, Company Regulations, and Islamic criminal law. This caused issues later in history when people who were not with the East India Company and were not native to India committed crimes in India. It was not easy to find out which law systems they should be subject to. In terms of Mofussil courts, Europeans still had an advantage over Indians since they could bring suit against Indians in any mofussil court but Indians would have to go to the Supreme Court to bring suit to Europeans. This was financially and logistically very hard, causing a lot of dismay in Indians. Europeans often used this system to abuse and exploit Indians in criminal and civil litigation. This system was ended in 1793 by the Bengal Government, which prohibited all Europeans from living more than ten miles from Calcutta unless they agreed to be subject to Mofussil courts.
In the early 1830s, there were motions within the House of Commons, during the debates for the renewal of the East India Company's royal charter, for a special “Select Committee” to be made to look into the East India Company's objectives and operations in India. The motions were brought to the attention of the House of Commons because there were concerns about the East India Company's effectiveness in the administration of justice and law-making. The general consensus coming out of the Select Committee was that the law in India required reform since the East India Company's current system had conflicting laws and had religious laws that did not bode well with unity. The East India Company's charter of 1833 radically changed the structure of law-making in India with regard to the legislatures, it replaced the legislatures of each region with an all-India Legislative Council that had wide jurisdiction and general legislative power. This stripped the law-making authority of the Presidencies which had conflicting laws and made the law more unitary in nature. The council passed all-India laws as well as an Indian Law Commission. The progenitor of this codification was a British lawyer by the name of Thomas Macaulay who became the first Law Member, the head of the All-India Legislative Council, and the first head of the Law Commission. He had gone before parliament in July 1883 to make his case as to why India's government needed reformation and, according to the minutes from the meeting, he believed that Europeans provided the grounds for representative institutions but said that “in India, you cannot have representative institutions” since they do not know “what good governance is” and the “British must be the ones to show them”. Macaulay then set his sights on being the one to codify Indian law and set sail to India by the end of 1883. By the end of 1884, Macaulay and the All-India Legislative Council had officially begun the process of the codification of Indian Law. This is when India's laws became more attuned with British Common Law, which came from rulings in British legal cases, and is what Judges used to decide cases. This meant that India had limited, on the way to becoming zero, usage of Hindu or Islamic Laws while the law of the colonizers became the predominant form of litigation. This was seemingly problematic as it did not take into concern the pre-existing Islamic and Hindu Laws that governed their societies for a long time. However, acceptance of this new code of laws was wide in India.
As a result, the present judicial system of the country derives largely from the British system and has few, if any, connections to Indian legal institutions of the pre-British era.
Constitutional and administrative law
The Constitution of India, which came into effect on 26 January 1950 is the lengthiest written constitution in the world. Although its administrative provisions are to a large extent based on the Government of India Act 1935, it also contains various other provisions that were drawn from other constitutions in the world at the time of its creation. It provides details of the administration of both the Union and the States, and codifies the relations between the Federal Government and the State Governments. Also incorporated into the text are a chapter on the fundamental rights of citizens, as well as a chapter on directive principles of state policy.The constitution prescribes a federal structure of government, with a clearly defined separation of legislative and executive powers between the Federation and the States. Each State Government has the freedom to draft its own laws on subjects classified as state subjects. Laws passed by the Parliament of India and other pre-existing central laws on subjects classified as central subjects are binding on all citizens. However, the Constitution also has certain unitary features, such as vesting power of amendment solely in the Federal Government, the absence of dual citizenship, and the overriding authority assumed by the Federal Government in times of emergency.
Criminal law
The Indian Penal Code formulated by the British during the British Raj in 1860, forms the backbone of criminal law in India. This law was later repealed and replaced by Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita. The Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973 governs the procedural aspects of the criminal law.Jury trials were abolished by the government in 1960 on the grounds they would be susceptible to media and public influence. This decision was based on an 8-1 acquittal of Kawas Nanavati in K. M. Nanavati vs. State of Maharashtra, which was overturned by higher courts.
In February 2011, the Supreme Court of India ruled that criminal defendants have a constitutional right to counsel.
Capital punishment in India is legal. Renuka Shinde and Seema Mohan Gavit, who were guilty of kidnapping and killing at least 13 children under 6 years, are currently lodged in Yerwada Central Jail. They were also the first women in India to be given capital punishment. The last execution was conducted on 20 March 2020, where the death sentence was awarded to the convicts—Pawan Gupta, Akshay Singh Thakur, Vinay Sharma, and Mukesh Singh—by a trial court, a decision which was upheld by Delhi High Court and Supreme Court as well.