Forum-shopping and shopping forums in Indian purse seine fisheries an analysis of the upper ranges of a sociolegal law process

This paper enquires into the dispute resolution process of an important marine fishery in Tamil Nadu, India, in the current era. It makes use of insights drawn from Benda-Beckmann’s seminal paper (1981) that introduced the conceptual dyad “forum-shopping” and “shopping forums” to the sociolegal field of studies. While Benda-Beckmann focuses on dispute processing at the village level, this paper highlights the process whereby local disputes are introduced first to the Madras High Court and subsequently to the Supreme Court of India. An analysis of court materials, supplemented with ethnographic interviews, throws light on prevailing discourses that are argued to contain distinctive combinations of environmental, developmental, and distributive arguments. The paper argues that Benda-Beckmann’s contributions are multi-layered and continue to inspire contemporary scholars interested in legal pluralism. While Indian disputants’ shopping activity has changed to include higher state courts, the forums thus examined prove to actively engage in shopping for cases and for arguments.