Sociolegal Challenges for the Social Justice Continuum: Perspectives from India and South Africa

As legal jurisdictions in the Global South, both India and South Africa have long histories of inequality and structural oppression. This book engages in comparative sociolegal analysis to examine the contours of social justice in both countries.

It explores the role of law as an instrument for social change in the face of persistent conditions of injustice, discrimination, social exclusion, and socioeconomic vulnerabilities. The book addresses newly emerging socio-legal challenges for the social justice continuum in a neoliberal era. Focusing on four key themes, it explores:

- the challenges for labour law and social security including informalisation, climate change, and migrancy;

- law, technology, and social justice, with a focus on the role that emerging technologies often play to ameliorate or exacerbate social exclusion;

- sexual orientation, gender, and substantive equality, grappling with the disjuncture between law and lived realities; and

- pedagogical approaches to legal education and social justice lawyering.

Lucid and illuminating, this book will be of interest to academics, researchers, legal practitioners and social actors who are exploring legal strategies and developments to tackle comparative social justice challenges, especially in the Global South.

Varsha Bhagat-Ganguly has been a professor with Institute of Law, Nirma University and CRS, LBSNAA, Mussoorie and a fellow with Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, India.

Meghan Finn is a senior lecturer at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa.