About the speaker:
Gautam Bhatia is a constitutional lawyer and law scholar based in New Delhi, India. He is the author of The Transformative Constitution (HarperCollins 2019), Unsealed Covers: A Decade of the Constitution, the Courts, and the State (HarperCollins 2023), and Horizontal Rights: An Institutional Approach (Hart 2023), among others. The book under discussion –Horizontal Rights – originated as a D.Phil Thesis, completed at the University of Oxford in 2021. Since the publication of the book, he has been working further on horizontal rights theory and its intersection with political economy, and comparative horizontal rights doctrine in South Africa, Kenya, Jamaica, and India.
Abstract:
In this seminar, Gautam Bhatia will elaborate upon the core themes of his book, Horizontal Rights: An Institutional Approach (Hart 2023). This book argues that constitutional scholarship and doctrine, across jurisdictions, has proceeded from an inarticulate premise called ‘default verticality.’ This is based on a set of underlying philosophical assumptions, which presumes that constitutional rights are presumptively applicable against the State, and need special justification to be applied against private parties. Departing from default verticality and its underlying assumptions, the Horizontal Rights argues that constitutional rights should apply horizontally between private parties where the existence of an economic, social, or cultural institution creates a difference in power between the parties, and allows one to violate the rights of the other. The institutional approach aims to be both theoretically convincing, as well as providing a workable model for constitutional adjudication. It applies both to classic issues such as restrictive covenants, as well as cutting-edge contemporary legal problems around the regulation of platform work and the distribution of property upon divorce.