Examining the living metaphor in the Indian Constitution
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract One popular understanding of the Indian Constitution is that it is a living document that evolves with time. Even though this metaphor has been used consistently by all three branches of the Indian state, its use in Indian legal texts is underexplored—as of most metaphors generally. In this article, we critically evaluate the application of the living metaphor in Indian constitutional discourse. We first provide an overview of the use of metaphors generally, and especially in the legal field. We then identify the origins and trace the use of the living metaphor by studying select Supreme Court judgments which have likened the Constitution to a living text and analyse the Court’s reasons, if any, for doing so. A comparative analysis of how the Canadian, US, and Australian courts have employed the living metaphor demonstrates how the Indian experience differs in its application of the metaphor. We find that the Supreme Court has used different variants of the living metaphor, primarily to expand the ambit of Part III of the Constitution. However, due to the inconsistent and unreliable use of this metaphor, we find that this has the potential to lead to illiberal results. We thus make a case for the formulation of a doctrine of living constitutionalism which we think will be more resilient to anti-democratic challenges.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.032 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".