Yasser Latif Hamdani

The article last week elicited some interesting responses from readers regarding civil disobedience with people citing the examples of Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr as two practitioners of civil disobedience. I do not wish to get into controversy about whether the movements by these two great men were successes or failures and whether in […]

Aasia Bibi verdict came down precisely as expected. If this point has not been driven home after many such judgments by the superior judiciary on blasphemy, let me state it frankly in black and white. Since the advent of the UN Human Rights Declaration and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the idea […]

A newspaper recently reported that women are going to get the right of divorce soon. What it meant to say was that there was a direct mechanism that would now be made available to only those women who had negotiated the delegated right of tal’ aq. Otherwise of course there is the right of Khula […]

The removal of Justice Shaukat Aziz Siddiqui of the Islamabad High Court is a red-letter day, for all those who want a Pakistan based on rule of law and justice. This might upset some people, given that Siddiqui, has become a cause for even some liberals in recent times, but they are not fully acquainted […]

In my previous article, published on Monday, I praised the International Islamic University for producing good lawyers, but on the very same day new information came to my attention, that has made me reconsider my ill-thought out recommendation. I had been invited by the student body at their law school to deliver a lecture on […]

It is true of all professions that real professional training, is not your academic credentials but what you learn on the job. For the longest time, the profession of law did not require an academic degree or formal education in law. It was rather learnt by apprenticeship of sorts with established legal practitioners. Take Abraham […]

A little less than 102 years ago a conference on October 21, 1916 brought the who’s who of Bombay’s political leaders together to discuss the issues pertinent to Bombay Presidency in particular and India in general. It was presided over by a 40-year-old lawyer who was a prominent leader of both the Indian National Congress […]

As the common law evolved, the idea of a constitution of the state gradually emerged as we understand it today. Since Pakistan is a common law country, I will not touch the continental, i.e. mainland European variants. In Common Law, a constitution was not necessarily a written or codified charter but rather a series of […]

While most things seem to be going wrong for the present government, the one piece of good news is that it seems to be sincere about bringing about actual legal reforms in the country in terms of procedure, especially vis a vis civil cases. In so far as civil procedure goes, we are still proceeding […]

This past week has been great for our neighbouring country, India and a terrible one for us. The Indian Supreme Court (ISC) struck down the colonial Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code by arguing that there was no presumption of constitutionality for it. The ISC chose to read into Articles 14, 15 and 21 […]