Explicating what the law is has always been the monopoly of lawyers, who have seemingly been granted the 'exclusive' power to decipher the mysteries of the law and interpret them for the wider world. The hegemony of this group over the wide realm of law is perhaps best illustrated by the fact that, even in meetings of activists, the final word on legal strategy is generally left to the lawyer.
For their part, lawyers take this reverence for their station as their natural due; this deference has, in fact, resulted in keeping out many alternative interpretations of the law. In any library or bookshop, a mountain of volumes that specialise in law can be found, all of which will prove to be learned discussions on various incomprehensible acts. What is common to these erudite tomes is the way that they doggedly plod from provision to provision, detailing exactly how the courts have interpreted various laws. Any lay person who happens to peruse such books would happily decide to leave these stolid and boring versions of the law to the lawyers. Doing so, however, only reinforces the monopoly that the profession has on the interpretation of law.
This is indeed a tragedy. Many other disciplines have both fresh and useful interpretations of the myriad issues surrounding law. The Sarai Reader V: Bare Acts is a unique attempt at wresting the monopoly over law from the lawyers and jurists. The Bare Act, as the editors note, is "an expression used to specify the content of the law, bereft of any interpretative gloss. In a legal library in India and many parts of the English-speaking world, a Bare Act is a document that simply codifies a law without annotation or commentary. The 'Bare Act' is legality pared down to its textual essence. It expresses only what the law does and what it can do."
The book's variety of contributors include activists, media persons, anthropologists, cultural theorists, teachers, journalists as well as lawyers, whose perspectives seek to locate the 'bare act' within the understanding of these separate disciplines. The diversity of the issues covered is striking: armed rebellion, terrorism, police violence, piracy, religious intolerance, cyber cultures, media surveillance, sex work and sexual nonconformity all share space here, vividly communicating the range of concerns that make up the role of the legal realm in the contemporary era.