Foreword: World of Our Cousins

Most of the people who live under some version of the common law today live in South Asia, as do a large portion (perhaps a majority) of those who live under a working constitutional democracy. Nevertheless, until very recently this part of our world was quite invisible to the American legal academy and profession. It is a pleasure to introduce this symposium, apparently the first of any mainstream American law review to focus on South Asian law. Its appearance is one of several markers that the neglect of South Asia by American law schools is being left behind. Four of the five articles included here were presented at a session of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) 2010 meeting; the first appearance of South Asia on the program since a 1986 plenary session on the American participation in the litigation arising from the 1984 Bhopal gas leak disaster. Unlike that earlier, one-off appearance, the 2010 session marks the institutionalization of interest in the area. It will be followed by the formal inauguration of a Section on South Asian Law at the AALS’s annual meeting in January 2011. The presentation of a diverse set of papers on South Asian topics reflects an explosive increase in research and writing on this part of the world by scholars based at American institutions. After a burst of interest in the early years of independence, publications about South Asian topics in journals listed in the Index to Legal Periodicals fell to just 34 in the 1970s but rose to 88 in the 1980s, to 256 in the 1990s, and to 684 in the first decade of this century. South Asia is the conventional appellation for the Indian subcontinent and its environs, namely India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bhutan. The first three are the successors to British India and the affiliated princely states; they emerged from two centuries of rule by Britain with a