Ageing is the defining feature of human life. Inevitably, time is at the centre of our existence and founds our understanding of what a life should be: one with a certain amount of time, one whose end is palatable only when it is preceded by ageing, which is nothing but the passage of time through the body. This is the very meaning of biological life, and it necessarily
conditions human imagination and social experience. And if ageing is central to social life, it must also be central to the law’s organisation of our social structures. Indeed, the law declares an age of majority, an age of consent, an age of criminal responsibility, an age of political agency, an age until which one has a right to education, an age at which one becomes eligible for certain offices, an age prior to which others have duties of care towards us, an age beyond which others have duties of care towards us, and so on. From the unborn foetus to the senior citizen, in a myriad spheres, the precise number of discrete units of time that have passed through our bodies significantly determines our legal situation.
Here, as everywhere, the law must draw lines. Here, perhaps more than in other contexts, the artificial nature of these lines is evident. One is transformed literally overnight from being incompetent to being competent (or vice versa), from being a ‘minor’ to being an ‘adult’, from being an ‘adult’ to being a ‘senior’. Once the arbitrary and contingent nature of these legal markers is realised, a host of questions follow:
what factors determine where these lines
are drawn?
How are they influenced by political contexts, economic events, social
hierarchies?
What social practices evolve around this line-drawing?
How does the law imagine human relationships in terms of ageing?
And if justice involves an attention to the
particularities of each individual, how can it be reconciled with universal generalisations
embodied in a simple number of years?
If the above concerns how the law conceives of the body changing in time, one may also critically examine the manner in which, in thought and in language, we conceive of the law.
itself in temporal terms. Such metaphors are common in legal discourse, where we speak of
‘a growing body of case-law’, ‘a young jurisdiction’, ‘an age-old doctrine’; ageing is not only the object of law but also the conceptual lens through which we try to understand it.
For its Winter 2022 issue (Vol. 13 Issue 2), the Jindal Global Law Review (JGLR) invites
contributions that critically explore such questions of jurisprudential gerontology. General jurisprudence, discourse analysis, socio-legal analysis, historical analysis—many different modes of thought may help us reflect not only on how the law imagines age and ageing, but also on how we perceive law through the prism of time and the body. Criminal law, family
law, anti-discrimination law, welfare law, employment law, international humanitarian law, refugee law, nationality law, tort law, contract law, education law, election law, health law, and many other legal fields offer us the opportunity to think about age, ageing, law, and justice. As a law review with a critical and inter-disciplinary orientation, we welcome
contributions across disciplines, jurisdictions and forms, with a particular interest in academic
works that critically examine current events with historical traction. We are also very interested in contributions that are not jurisdiction-specific but explore questions of law and age/ageing at a comparative or a conceptual level. Along with full-length academic articles, we also welcome other forms such as case-notes, book reviews, review essays, long-form interviews, photo-essays, and field reports.
Please submit
300-word abstract by 15 December, 2021.
Decisions on accepted abstracts
will be announced by 1 January, 2022.
Complete articles will be due on 1 May, 2022.
Please send any queries to [email protected] with carbon copies to [email protected] and
[email protected].
About JGLR
Founded in 2009, Jindal Global Law Review is the faculty-edited flagship journal of the Jindal Global Law School. JGLR is published twice a year, with each issue curated as a themed dossier on a specific area of both historical and contemporary significance to law. We publish peer-reviewed interdisciplinary and critical legal scholarship—with a focus on the
Global South— by academics in law and cognate disciplines that take the conventional and
the creative seriously.
JGLR is especially interested in publishing works that expand and reimagine the boundaries
of the legal discipline through innovations in method and form. We understand ‘law’ expansively as an assemblage of ideas, theories, methods, concepts, norms, traditions, politics, moralities, aesthetics, doctrines, policies, pluralities, and life practices.
JGLR is indexed in the SCOPUS database.
https://www.springer.com/journal/41020
http://www.jgu.edu.in/jgls/jglr
