Do you think that understanding of ‘social’ connected to everyday life is

important while examining the significance of court verdict? If you follow this
framework how do you outline your view on Sabrimala verdict?

Sociology is a particular category of rules and social practices associated with it.
The primary function of law is having a regulation on social interaction and
integration the society. The laws are basically norms, the legal norms that help us
to not injure a person, use public properties, carry out our personal rights, and
choose our leaders and many more. These norms are further connected to
practices by different roles, positions, interactions and organizations in different
ways. The normativeness of law can be understood as its ideal approach or its
moral evaluation. It’s an ideal prescription on how society should be ordered.
Every society has norms related to many social, political and economic conducts.
These norms vary according to the culture and temporary in nature. These norms
are ideal state representations of what we want or desire. For example ‘Whatever
Jesus ordered ought to serve as your norm.’, but the norm holds value only if they
are followed. This serves as a guide to people. Legal norms exist in concrete
settings of socio historical societies and never mere abstraction. Any study of law
or in fact formulation of law should look at practices of law which is different from
normative dimension.

The practice of law is the study of law that always believes in investigation of
factual dimension of law. These can be ideal rules or cultural rules or practices.
There is always a sense of duality of law which indicates difference between
norms and factual understanding. The sociology helps us understand this
difference and allow us to look into a different perspective. This duality can be
explained with various examples from history as well as our everyday lives.
The most prominent example is Sabrimala Verdict which could best explain this
duality.
Sabrimala temple is located in Kerala and is dedicated to Lord Ayyappa. This
temple prohibits the entry of women in menstruating years i.e. 10 to 50 years.
This was seen as discrimination against women and violates the freedom to
religion for women in legal sense. The state withstood that the power resides in
hands of priests to decide the rules of the shrine. This fact with backed up by
many laws supporting the same, if this was based on a custom. The final judgment
stated that it violates the rights of women to follow their religious rights.
This can be seen in two ways:
 1. The ideal approach says that it is correct and we should fight against
discrimination done to women and protects their rights. The women should
have equal share in society be it at any place. We should strive to bring
equality in society.
2. The material or actual dimension says what the reality has to offer. The
people considered this decision as interference of legal system in religious
beliefs. Even the women were opposing the decision as they have accepted
their position and don’t want to question the customs prevailing in the
history. Socially women have accepted their position and don’t wish to
challenge the social believes.

There are several examples that state the interaction between law and social
change:

1. Dowry Prohibition Act 1961

Dowry is giving some valuables or property by one family to other for
performing marriage rituals and connects as a family. The court abolished
this practice of dowry taking by passing a law that if any person found of
giving or taking dowry will be imprisoned for at least 5 years. This practice
burdened the bride’s family and were oppressed and obliged to give
groom’s family a huge part of their earnings.
The ideal decision is for the bride and her family who should not be
burdened in order to form an alliance. It was for the betterment for the
society and stop inappropriate pressurizing of girl and her family.
But this practice is still followed and least reported crime in India. The
families internally accept the valuables without questions and mutually
agreeing to accept dowry. This is real time practice and material dimension
to court’s verdict. Although the law tried to abolish the ill practice but still
the society doesn’t want to imbibe the same in actual practice.

2. India as secular nation

India is documented as secular nation which means that there is no state
religion. Secularism is defined as practice where a person’s religion will not
affect any aspect of life and every religion is equally respected.
In ideal state:
1. Everyone should come under same set of laws.
2. Religious places should autonomous
 3. Educational institutes should be same for everyone
But in day to day aspect we come through facts that:
1. Every religion comes under different set of rules and these rules are
made as per believes of these religions
2. The government has control over Hindu temples but not other religious
place. They continue to be autonomous.
3. There are different laws practiced by majority and minority educational
institutes.
There are many other aspects as well where India lacks to be completely
secular in nature but still can be called secular for b the being the only
country to have so many religions living peacefully together.

4. The prohibition of employment as manual scavengers and their

rehabilitation act 2013
This prohibited the manual cleaning of drainage places and their
exploitation. This was ideally brought up to maintain the dignity of an
individual as the goals in preamble to constitution. The right to live life
with dignity is an implicit fundamental right guaranteed in Part 3 of
constitution. But in reality there are many numbers of people who die
while cleaning sewers and septic tanks and it has been increasing over
last few years. In 2019 we saw the highest number of manual
scavengers die.
All these above examples affirm that the laws made by authority is followed and
accepted only if society accepts it whole heartedly and not when they are forced
to do the same. This situation is not in major aspects but in our everyday life.
There has to be equal acceptance of law by the society to move to next step of
development.