Undergraduate Studies

The BA programme in Law and Politics at AUD introduces students to the dynamism of the legal and political field, which extends beyond the study of formal institutions. It will explicate the productive entanglement of law and politics and the manner in which they co-constitute and generate each other. The undergraduate programmes at AUD offer students a wide choice of courses.

The BA Programme in Law and Politics (BA-LP) can best be described as understanding the relationship between these two domains and not thinking of law and politics as discrete domains. The concept of citizenship mediates this relationship and the BA-LP will foreground how citizenship in India continues to be arbitrated through legal processes, with these processes impelled by the political. It is the continuous movement between the legal and the political, where one needs the other for its articulation, which forms the foundation of BA-LP. The programme’s inclination will be to delineate how law impresses upon life outside the structuring space of the courtroom and how in our political sensibilities, too, we draw upon law’s syntax—citizenship, rights, duties, state, democracy, justice, order—to make our everyday comprehensible. Politics is a quintessential aspect of our public, and also private, life; indeed the public/private distinction is itself historically produced. The emphasis of the programme will be on a conceptual introduction to core areas of public law as well as private law, which will provide a foundation that is needed to conduct interdisciplinary conversations. Within this eclectic framework, the BA in Law and Politics aspires to enlarge the formal structure of law, where we will scrutinize its immanent principles, its expression as the resolution of a political community that is envisioned to be upheld by institutions of the State and as an enunciation of rights of the citizens, which then shapes the relationship between a State and its citizens. What propels this framework forward is an understanding of politics premised on a sense of mutability and amorphousness, which may nevertheless be innovating and full of democratic possibilities.