History of Legislature

Every court this paper has studied needed a source of law to apply. Someone had to write the charters, the Regulating Act, the Acts of Cornwallis, the Indian High Courts Act — and that someone kept changing, from the Crown alone, to Parliament in London, to a Governor-General-in-Council in Calcutta, to an actual elected Indian legislature. This topic is the missing half of the story: not who judged, but who made the law being judged by.

In two minutes

India's legislative history runs from a single royal charter in 1600, through Parliament progressively handing law-making power to bodies inside India, to a fully elected Constituent Assembly drafting India's own Constitution in 1947 — and every earlier topic in this paper assumed a legislature existed somewhere to write the law its courts applied.

The rest of this chapter

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