Warwick Law School’s Dr Laura Lammasniemi has won the prestigious Indian Law Review Best Article Prize 2021 for a co-authored article called ‘Dadaji Bhikaji v Rukhmabai (1886) ILR 10 Bom 301: Rewriting Consent and Conjugal Relations in Colonial India'.

The article was a collaboration between Laura, Dr Kanika Sharma (SOAS, University of London) and Professor Tanika Sarkar (Jawaharlal Nehru University, India) and it was written for the Indian Feminist Judgments Project (IFJP).

The IFJP seeks to rewrite important Indian legal judgments from a feminist lens while using the legal resources available at the time to show that a different outcome could have been reached.  

The article offers a fresh look into an important 19^th century case called Bhikaji v Rukhmabai, heard in colonial India. The case focused on the question of whether a woman could be forced to cohabit with a man, she was married to as a child, against her will. By re-imagining the case, the authors considered 19^th century perceptions around marriage, consent, and colonial legal transplants and provide missing legal history on the doctrine of restitution of conjugal rights. 

The Indian Law Review Best Article Prize is awarded annually to the best article published each year. Indian Law Review prize sub-committee described the article as: “[A]n excellent and exceptionally well-structured paper’ which “provides a strong model for feminist adjudication in India and elsewhere.” 

The article is open access and available here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/24730580.2021.1962083Link opens in a new window 

Laura is an Associate Professor at Warwick Law School. Her research focuses on the history of criminal law, and she is currently working on a Leverhulme-funded project on the history of sexual consent. Find out moreLink opens in a new window.

Image: Rukhmabai Raut, the woman defendant in the case of Dadaji Bhikaji v Rukhmabai (1886).

After the case, Rukhmabai trained as a doctor and became the first female physician in India.