Do courts grant Indian women their inheritance claims?
Land Economy Research Seminar
Despite inheritance law reform towards gender equality in India, families rarely transfer immovable property to women. Given this, do women use courts to claim their rights? If so, who opposes them? What kind of property is disputed? How long do cases take? To what extent do judgements favour women, and what does the language of judgements reveal? No prior study has addressed these questions.
Bridging economics and law, this talk will do so, based on pioneering research that innovatively uses online case law data to probe High court judgements delivered across India over fifteen years, 2005-2020. This is the first paper of its kind to do so. It arrives at some unexpected findings.
Bina Agarwal is Professor of Development Economics and Environment at the GDI, University of Manchester, UK. She is also an alumna and Honorary Fellow of Murray Edwards College, Cambridge. Her publications cover agrarian change, environmental governance, property rights, gender inequality, and law. Agarwal’s many awards include the International Balzan Prize 2017 for gender studies; the Kenneth Boulding award in Ecological Economics 2023, and the first Global Inequality Research Award, 2024, France.