In 2001, the world began talking about BRIC – Brazil, Russia, India and China – as a potential powerhouse in the world economy. After the 2008 international financial crisis, BRIC gained prominent momentum and the world saw them as a serious actor to be watched. Today, BRICS (South Africa became a member of the bloc in 2010) are being closely watched because there is no certainty as to their future. The Shanghai-based New Development Bank was launched in this context and in answer to the institutional crisis that the world observed with concern when US-guided international economic institutions could not lead the way out of the 2008 crisis and into recovery. While each country around the globe lives its own domestic reality, the Trump phenomenon in the United States has erupted on the international stage and is proving to lead the still largest economy in the world onto the opposite path of the one set by the United Nations in its 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. These events as well as the roles played by the UN and the G20 are the subject of this article. They are analyzed in order to provide a framework from which to answer the following questions: Is the Shanghai-based New Development Bank a fledgling alternative to the World Bank, and are the BRICS a possible alternative to a more cooperative future?

Legal aid in India has evolved over the last few decades since 42nd Amendment to the Indian Constitution. This paper attempts to provide philosophical underpinnings suggesting how legal aid model has evolved over the years and excogitate a newer trajectory for its future evolution. It delves into weighing Kant’s imperfect duty justifying a charity based regime and marks a transition to utilitarian model suggesting requirement of institutional need to address issues of basic liberty of ‘access to justice.’ It also spells out Rawls’ principles of justice and attempts to explore their applicability in the Indian context, to chart out a road map for future. While contrasting different models on legal aids, it makes a finding that, India doesn’t accord priority to liberty of access to justice. The Indian Supreme Court has emerged as a bastion of liberty but the finer details of the enactment has been messed up by the Indian lawmakers. The lower compensation to lawyers and lack of alternative incentives in attracting established litigators, testifies this. There is a convergence in Kantian duty of benevolence and Rawls’ liberty principle but in the world of moral relativism, a fair compensation must precede before imposing any obligation on lawyers to take up pro bono matters, as doing so, is likely to compromise their ‘true needs.’

The present paper deals with the theoretical question of how can be warranted unity of legal system in the perspective of building up a new legal order of the BRICS. The author draws on the contemporary theories considering various aspects of explanation and construction of law as of a logically united system. Among such aspects are logical unity of legal propositions, epistemological unity of the phenomena unified under the term ‘law,’ factual unity of societal regulation, axiological unity of a hierarchy of legal values, procedural unity of legal reasoning, synergetic unison. It is asserted that the idea of unity of law is not something conceptually monolithic and allows for different readings, none of which can claim to be exhaustive. The author suggests that the BRICS does not need follow the track of systematization of the legislation of the Member States and that creating agglomerations of legal texts from different legal orders of the Member States is an issue not for politician but rather for legal scholars who can construct and reconstruct legal texts, jointing and disjointing them in the view of practical needs of amelioration of legal technique.

In MainlandChina, summary procedure is procedure applied at the first instance by basic-level courts and their detached tribunals. As simplified formal procedure, summary procedure can be classified into three types: 1) general / mandatory summary procedure, which is applied to cases with clear facts, unambiguous rights and obligations and minor disputes; 2) consensus procedure, which is applied to cases other than those to which mandatory summary procedure is applied, with the parties’ agreement on the application; 3) special summary procedure, which is ‘small claim procedure’ applied to cases involving amounts lower than 30 percent of the previous year’s average annual wages of workers in a given province and the judgment of the basic-level court or detached tribunal shall be final.

The lives of human beings are full of complexities, but LGBT face much more trauma compared to other people. What is necessary is to understand the sentiments of the LGBT community and also to grant them common human rights. But the world lowers its eyes and refuses a discussion over the granting of basic human rights to the LGBT community. And it is so sad to see that such discrimination exists even in the 21st century. Indian law, on the whole, only recognizes the paradigm of the binary genders of male and female, based on a person’s sex assigned at birth, which permits a gender system, including the laws relating to marriage, adoption, inheritance, succession and taxation, and welfare legislation. The most pertinent question with respect to the LGBT community is whether LGBT are to be discriminated against by other human beings. Merely being different does not give others the authority to ostracize one from society. In fact, in July 2009 the Delhi High Court ruled that consensual same-sex relations between adults in private could not be criminalized. Then in a recent judgment, the Supreme Court of India expressed its concerns over the mental trauma, emotional agony and pain of the members of the transgender community: all forms of mental suffering of the LGBT community, as well as ignorance and isolation of the community, were brought to an end by the Court’s decision in National Legal Services Authority v. Union of India & Others.

One of the most implicit foundations of a person’s identity today, in a cultural, national as well as global context, is the collegial relationship which he or she shares with another person, that relationship ultimately giving formation to a conjoint, consolidated and co-dependent recognition of the two as one under the law, particularly with respect to resolving socio-familial issues such as those of parentship, guardianship, adoption, succession and inheritance, among others. The term “relationship” mentioned above is connotative of marriage and the following paper attempts to look at this relationship, in its connection to the various facets of one’s personal identity as a citizen, from the perspective of a third gender Hindu Indian national. Though the right to marry of such an individual, especially as seen against the backdrop of the existing communal ethos in the country, may be accepted as being some form of a heterodoxy, it still falls short of qualifying as anything that could be called, in the least, “heretical” or even illegal. While due to the constraints of time the authors of the present study have been compelled to restrict the same to only a particular division of nationality and a further specific sub-class thereof, the authors sincerely hope that this study will inspire further such examinations into its chosen subject within the field domains of other religions and nationalities.

This study consists of a critical comparative analysis of the administrative justice systems in eighteen Latin-American signatory countries of the American Convention on Human Rights (Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, the Dominican Republic, Uruguay, and Venezuela). According to this article, the excessive litigation in Latin-American courts that has seriously hampered the effectiveness of the administrative justice systems may be explained as follows: as former Iberian colonies, the aforementioned countries have a Continental European legal culture originating in civil law but nevertheless have improperly integrated certain aspects of the unified judicial system (generalized courts) typical of administrative law in common-law countries. This situation, according to the author, could be rectified through strengthening the public administrative authorities with respect to their dispute-resolution and purely executive functions by endowing them with prerogatives to act independently and impartially, oriented by the principle of legality understood in the sense of supremacy of fundamental rights, in light of the doctrine of diffuse conventionality control adopted by the InterAmerican Court of Human Rights.