Academics Value Added Courses

Meaning and definitions of public policy and “public problems”; characteristics of public policy; public policy distinguished from politics, governance, public administration and law; policy, programme, scheme, project and law; the role of data and public opinion; the Indian policy context; Lowi's typology (distributive, redistributive, regulatory, constituent); national, state and local levels of policy.

Problem identification and framing; agenda-setting and “policy windows”; policy formulation, stakeholder consultation and trade-offs; rational, incremental, elite and pluralist models of decision-making; policy adoption through legislation, rules and regulations; top-down and bottom-up implementation and street-level bureaucracy; the implementation gap; monitoring and evaluation; policy termination and redesign; limitations of the policy-cycle model.

Fundamental Rights and Directive Principles as policy foundations; separation of powers; Parliament, State Legislatures, parliamentary committees and Private Member's Bills; political and permanent executive; ministries and cabinet committees; judicial review, PIL, and debates on judicial activism and overreach; non-state actors including NGOs, media, think tanks and international organisations; Panchayati Raj Institutions and Municipalities.

Criteria of efficiency, effectiveness, equity and feasibility; types and limits of policy evidence; cost-benefit, cost-effectiveness, distributive and risk analysis; stakeholder mapping; policy instruments from regulation and taxation to behavioural nudges and digital instruments; NITI Aayog; Centre–State dynamics and the GST Council; process, outcome and impact evaluation; writing a policy brief.

Social justice and affirmative action in policy design; rights-based case studies on the Right to Education Act, 2009 and the National Food Security Act, 2013; judiciary-driven case studies on the Puttaswamy privacy judgment and environmental policy through PIL (M.C. Mehta cases, National Green Tribunal); emerging challenges in climate change, digital governance, AI regulation and data privacy (Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023), public health, urbanisation and employment.

Pareto and Kaldor-Hicks efficiency and the balance with equity; rational choice, opportunity cost and marginal analysis; market failures (externalities, asymmetric information, public goods and monopoly) as justifications for legal intervention; the Coase Theorem and transaction costs.

The economic theory of property rights and the Calabresi-Melamed framework of property, liability and inalienability rules; intellectual property and the public goods problem; contracts as risk-allocation instruments, moral hazard and adverse selection; efficient breach and the economics of contract remedies.

Minimising the social cost of accidents and the Learned Hand formula; strict liability versus negligence; contributory and comparative negligence and joint and several liability; damages, punitive damages, insurance and risk allocation.

The Becker model of crime and deterrence; certainty versus severity of punishment; optimal sanctions (fines versus imprisonment); the economics of plea bargaining, prosecutorial discretion and the standard of proof; behavioural law and economics; deterrence of white-collar crime, corporate offences, corruption and cybercrime.

Public choice theory, rent-seeking and regulatory capture; the economics of competition law and market regulation; constitutions as pre-commitment devices and the economic foundations of the rule of law; course synthesis.