Socio-Legal Hub Seminar Series: Terror and Technicalities: Looking for Life in Delhi’s Courts

The Socio-Legal Hub Seminar Series is a forum for substantive, methodological and conceptual discussions within the field of socio-legal studies.

In his book Terror Trials: Life and Law in Delhi’s Courts, Mayur Suresh studies the lives of people accused of terrorism offences, in Delhi’s Tis Hazari courts. Amidst the grinding terror trials – which are replete with stories of torture, illegal detention and fabricated charges – the book explores how terror-accused schooled themselves in legal procedures. The book shows that though seemingly mundane, legal technicalities are fraught and highly contested, and acquire urgent ethical qualities in the life of a trial: legal language becomes a question of a form of life, the file becomes a space in which the world can be made or unmade, the petition a way of imagining a future, and investigative and courtroom procedures enable the unexpected formation of close relationships between police and terror-accused. In attending to the ways in which legal technicalities are made to work – through legal language, through files and the everyday interactions among lawyers, judges, accused terrorists, and police – we are offered a way of understanding how human expressiveness, creativity and vulnerability emerge through the law.

Speaker: Dr Mayur Suresh 

Dr Mayur Suresh is a Reader in Law at SOAS, University of London and has taught at SOAS since 2015. Prior to his academic career, Mayur practiced law in Delhi. Mayur’s research is based on ethnographic fieldwork in terrorism cases that took place in Delhi’s trial courts and his book Terror Trials: Life and Law in Delhi’s Courts (Fordham University Press, 2023) is derived from this research. In 2023 Mayur was awarded the Leverhulme Research Leadership Award for a project titled The Social Life of Law in Authoritarian Contexts.

A light sandwich lunch will be provided at the event.

This event will be on a first-come first-served basis.