State

Maharashtra is a State, and so is India, and so is the Government of Maharashtra when a newspaper headline says that the State has decided something. The word is doing three jobs at once. Behind all three sits a bigger question that a first-year student rarely asks: what is it that gives a group of people living between the Western Ghats and the Arabian Sea the power to make rules and enforce them? This topic describes what a State is, what it is made of, and the old theories about how it came to exist.

In two minutes

A State is a politically organised community of people occupying a defined territory under a government that is independent of external control; its four elements are population, territory, government and sovereignty, and its origin has been explained by divine, social contract, patriarchal and matriarchal theories.

The rest of this chapter

The full explanation, the cheat sheet, every previous-year question at every mark weight, the quiz and the answer skeletons are part of Jurisprudence / Legal Theory on LexBlox Semester. Sign in to unlock the subject, or read Module 1 of Legal Language and Writing free.