International Journal of Education & Applied Sciences Research
Print ISSN : 2349 –4808
Online ISSN : 2349 –2899
Frequency : Continuous
Current Issue : Volume 10 , Issue 1
2023
Ruchira Chaturvedi
Ruchira Chaturvedi, Assistant Professor of Law, Dharmashastra National Law University, Jabalpur
DOI : https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21430800 Page No : 72-82
Published Online : 2023-06-30
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ABSTRACT
Public law curricula regularly require students to engage with open-textured legal terms that are defined in some abstraction by the legislature and in concrete through judicial interpretation. One such open textured expression‘public order’is the one of the most commonly usedexpressions and isyet a theoretically overlooked notion. In the pedagogical setting of a Public Law classroom, discourse between instructor and students frequently centres upon the permissible boundaries of governmental action when restricting, altering, or otherwise intruding upon the liberties of individuals subject to its authority. Although such discussions typically engage with two principal dimensions—namely, positive law and jurisprudential reasoning—they also, often implicitly, involve a semiotic interrogation of the textual architecture of legal provisions. This semiotic engagement, despite constituting a foundational element of the pedagogical exercise, rarely receives explicit recognition as an independent mode of inquiry within public law education.
To exemplify and substantiate this central argument the paper undertakes an examination of ‘public order’ as ajustificatory ground for state intervention.It explores the legal essence of public order as a representative constitutional expression by law and judicial decisions of the Supreme Court of India‚ through a qualitative doctrinal research design and an analytical deductive approach‚ and to reconstruct the legal meaning of public order through a semantic and semiotic analysis․ The paper argues for the importance of understanding the constitutional meaning of the expression in a dynamic context of statute‚ case law and institutional practice․ By drawing on legal semiotics and public law pedagogy‚ this study adds an interdisciplinary framework to the literature on open-textured constitutional expressions and to the study of constitutional interpretation and legal education․
Keywords: Public Law, Public Order, Semantics, Semiotics, Linguistic analysis, pedagogy
