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In Beyond the Algorithm: Qualitative Insights for Gig Work Regulation, Deepa Das Acevedo and a collection of scholars and experts show why government actors must go beyond mass surveys and data-scrubbing in order to truly understand the realities of gig work. The contributors draw on qualitative empirical research to reveal the narratives and real-life experiences that define gig work, and they connect these insights to policy debates being fought out in courts, town halls, and even in Congress itself. The book also bridges academic and non-academic worlds by drawing on the experiences of drivers, journalists, and workers' advocates who were among the first people to study gig work from the bottom up. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in gig work, the legal infrastructure surrounding it, and how that infrastructure can and must be improved.

AbstractThe Indian Supreme Court has long enjoyed an almost mythic reputation for progressive and creative jurisprudence, but a series of recent scandals is beginning to erode this well-settled authority. One of the most troubling of these incidents has been an allegation of sexual harassment and intimidation by a Court staffer against then sitting Chief Justice of India (CJI) Ranjan Gogoi. This article draws on media analysis and ethnographic research conducted in the immediate aftermath of the "CJI Scandal" to explore what it means for judges and judging in contemporary India. I argue that the justices' response to the allegations are part of a broader shift in Indian judging. Far from being the product of an institution imbued with mythic qualities, judging in India is increasingly coming to represent an example of mythos, or "an assertive discourse of power and authority … something to be believed and obeyed."

AbstractCharan Shah's 1999 death was widely considered to be the first sati, or widow immolation, to have occurred in India in over twenty years. Media coverage of the event focused on procedural minutiae—her sari, her demeanor—and ultimately, several progressive commentators came to the counterintuitive conclusion that the ritually anomalous nature of Charan's death confirmed its voluntary, secular, and noncriminal nature. This article argues that the "unlabeling" of Charan's death, like those of other women between 1999 and 2006, reflects a tension between the nonindividuated, impervious model of personhood exemplified by sati and the particularized citizen‐subject of liberal‐democratic politics in India.

American constitutional law scholars have long questioned whether courts can truly drive social reform, and this uncertainty remains even in the wake of recent landmark decisions affecting the LGBT community. In contrast, court watchers in India—spurred by developments in a special type of legal action developed in the late 1970s known as public interest litigation (PIL)—have only recently begun to question the judiciary's ability to promote progressive social change. Indian scholarship on this point has veered between despair that PIL cases no longer reliably produce good outcomes for India's most disadvantaged and optimism that public interest litigation can be returned to its glory days of heroic judicial intervention. Perhaps no pair of cases so nicely captures this dichotomy as the 2009 decision in Naz Foundation v. Government of NCT of Delhi, which decriminalized sodomy, and the 2012 decision in Koushal v. Naz Foundation, which overruled Naz. This paper uses public interest litigation and India's recent sodomy cases to demonstrate that the relationship between state actors and citizens is often far less stable than the democratic ideal of "citizen sovereignty" would suggest. I argue, first, that supporters of public interest litigation should neither give up on PIL suits as a means of effecting social reform nor imagine that PIL suits can ever reliably produce desirable outcomes. As a type of legal action, public interest litigation simply cannot be reverse engineered in this way. But second, I show why this unreliability is not as worrisome as it might first appear to be, by analyzing the well-documented and widely critiqued shift in PIL cases at the end of the twentieth century. While earlier PIL cases reflect the Indian Constitution's commitment to government-led social reform and the sharing of sovereignty between citizens and the state, contemporary PIL cases reflect the Constitution's commitment to an agency theory of sovereignty whereby government merely acts on behalf of citizens. Neither vision of sovereignty is paramount over the long run, and shifts in public interest litigation reflect the productive and dynamic equilibrium between the two.