Comparative Constitutional Law

This FESTSCHRIFT written in honour of an eminent constitutionalist and legal pedagogue of India, Professor P.K. Tripathi, consists of learned essays from renowned constitutionalists and jurists from all over the world.

This 2nd Edition of the collection has been thoroughly revised, updated and substantially enlarged while retaining its original title and scheme.

The essays cover a wide variety of subjects some of which, such as judicial review of legislative and executive actions, the principles that should guide the judges in the exercise of judicial review, legitimacy of judicial review vis-a-vis democracy, human rights including civil and political as well as economic and social rights, are of universal nature while others deal with these and other subjects such as directive principles versus fundamental rights, compensatory discrimination, constitutional protection of civil servants, constitutional foundations of administrative law, relationship between different organs of the state, institutional safeguarding the rights and liberties of the individual, role of judiciary in the preservation of federalism, more specifically in the context of different countries, namely, Federal Republic of Germany, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Malaysia, Pakistan, Poland, Sweden, United States and Yugoslavia. The essays deal with all these issues very thoroughly and profoundly.

Together the essays constitute an ideal work on comparative constitutional law. Not only do they deal with more than thirty important constitutional issues in at least ten different countries, they also cover as many as six different systems of law, namely, civil law, common law, Islamic law, law of the Far East, Scadinavian law and socialist law.

About the Author:

Mahendra Pal Singh (born 15 July 1940), popularly known as M.P. Singh, is a constitutional law scholar of India. He is best known amongst students of Constitution of India for being the revising author of V.N. Shukla's Constitution of India a standard textbook for lawyers on Constitution of India. Internationally however, he is more famous amongst scholars of comparative constitutional law and comparative administrative law for his work, German Administrative Law in Common Law Perspective.

Professor Singh has laid especial emphasis in making legal education more meaningful to Indian society by making the top law schools more accessible to the students from less privileged background. At NUJS, and since, he has been leading an effort called IDIA, or 'Increasing Diversity by Increasing Access', which involves an engagement with school going children from different parts of semi-urban and rural India and to encourage and help them enter the top law schools of the country. Towards the same end, he has also been heading a group of academicians, called the Legal Education and Research Society or 'LEARS' as it is popularly referred to. He has also been running a school in his village Jitholi for the children of the nearby places. Students from NUJS and volunteers from IDIA have often visited and interacted with the kids of this school