Smt. Shakuntala Devi 3rd International Moot Court Competition, 2026

Constitutional law sits at the foundation of modern statehood, defining the relationship between the individual and the state, allocating power among branches of government, and entrenching the fundamental rights that limit majoritarian rule. The modern constitutional tradition draws on instruments such as the English Bill of Rights (1689), the United States Constitution (1787), the post-war German Basic Law (1949), and the Constitution of India (1950), each of which has shaped a distinct approach to judicial review, federalism, and rights protection. The post-1945 era saw a global proliferation of written constitutions and constitutional courts, often catalysed by decolonisation, democratic transitions in Latin America and Eastern Europe, and the universalisation of human rights norms under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and successor covenants. The core disputes in contemporary constitutional law revolve around the limits of judicial review versus parliamentary sovereignty, the scope of unamendable 'basic structure' or eternity clauses (notably articulated in Kesavananda Bharati v. State of Kerala, 1973, and echoed in Article 79(3) of the German Basic Law), the horizontal application of fundamental rights against private actors, and the constitutional accommodation of emergency powers. Comparative jurisprudence has increasingly cross-pollinated, with apex courts citing one another on proportionality analysis, privacy, equality, and dignity, even as some jurisdictions have pushed back against 'foreign' constitutional borrowing. Today, constitutional systems face pressures from democratic backsliding, executive aggrandisement, the regulation of digital speech and surveillance, climate-rights litigation, and contested questions of secularism, federal balance, and minority protection. Debates over court-packing, judicial appointments, the use of ordinances and emergency decrees, and the constitutionality of citizenship and personal-law reforms illustrate that constitutional law is not a settled domain but a continuously renegotiated framework. Moot problems in this field typically require engagement with separation-of-powers doctrine, fundamental-rights jurisprudence, and standards of review developed across multiple jurisdictions.