Today is the eleventh anniversary of the blog (2 August 2013 – 2 August 2024). That’s a fairly decent chunk of time, when you think about it.
There have changes to the blog over the course of the last year – some visible, and some not – which I briefly want to talk about.
The visible one, of course, is the change in the name. It is now Constitutional Law and Philosophy (the URL remains indconlawphil, for reasons of nostalgia). The sub-head explains the shift in focus. Readers of the blog, of course, know well that over the last three years, I have been increasingly thinking about, and engaging with, contemporary Kenyan constitutional law. It has come to occupy a significant part of my interior landscape, both intellectually and emotionally. And while the blog has always had a comparative focus (under the “Notes from a Foreign Field” category), it no longer felt entirely appropriate, given the extent of engagement with Kenya, to park these posts in “Notes from a Foreign Field.” I only see this engagement broadening and deepening in the years to come, and new sub-head will – hopefully – set the tone for the blog’s second decade.
The other side of this – and perhaps less visible – is that I write less frequently about Indian constitutional law on this blog than I used to. There are two reasons for this. The first – straightforward – one is that since the completion of my PhD and return to legal practice in 2022, I have been increasingly involved with many of the constitutional law cases that are the subject matter of this blog. This was the case even earlier (NJAC, Aadhaar, Privacy etc), but back then, I was much younger in the profession, and my involvement was more peripheral. That has changed over the last year or so. I do think that there is some value to the old professional convention of not commenting on the cases you’ve been closely involved in – after all, you’ve had your say in the courtroom, and you can always refer readers to your written submissions – so I try not to. There are, of course, some exceptions to this principle, but that’s a subject for another day, and another blog post.
The second reason is more difficult to articulate, but has to do with the executive-leaning character of jurisprudence in the recent past. To put it bluntly, there are only so many times that you can write variations of “the Court ought not to have rubber-stamped the executive’s invocation of national security” or “the Court ought not to have denied bail on spurious arguments of conspiracy” or “the executive court” before it begins to grate – and eleven years is a long time to keep writing that! Writing a blog on constitutional law should be a joyful enterprise, full of ideas and new arguments, rethinking assumptions and being challenged. Writing in anger, or sorrow, or rage is good for the brief adrenaline rush, but eventually it catches up to you.
For a long time – as readers know – the blog would have analyses of judgments on the same day that they were delivered, almost by way of catharsis. That sort of thing becomes harder and harder to do when a large part of what you’re writing about are judgments such as these, month on month, year on year. For a few years you will yourself through it and keep going, but then there finally comes a day when the intellectual and emotional reserves are exhausted, and it all comes to a grinding halt: you find that you do not even want to look at the Supreme Court’s latest UAPA/PMLA/10th Schedule/[insert favourite area here] judgment, much less blog about it (eventually you do read the judgment, but it will be ten days later).
Fortunately, in the case of the blog, the slack has been taken up by numerous excellent guest authors (too many to name), which has meant that the blog’s coverage of Indian constitutional law has not slackened. It was wonderful to be able to host excellent ten-part series on the same-sex marriage case and the Article 370 case, both of which I could not write about, by virtue of my participation in those cases. I don’t have any doubt that all of that will continue into the future, and I think that whatever the extent of my own involvement, this blog as a space for engagement with Indian constitutional law will remain in (multiple) safe hands.
And of course, a blog anniversary is never a bad time to remind readers that if you want a curated account of the blog’s “major hits” during its first decade (a lot of those cases are still ongoing), HarperCollins published Unsealed Covers this time last year, which does exactly that.
I’m looking forward to Year 12.