Volume VIII, Issue III / 2026

Abstract. The Energy Conservation (Amendment) Act, 2022 recast a modest efficiency statute into the enabling framework for India’s first mandatory carbon market. In doing so it delegated to the executive not the implementation of a legislative choice but the choice itself: the emission-intensity trajectory, the supply of tradeable Carbon Credit Certificates, the price signal generated by compliance shortfalls, and the penalty architecture were all left to be fixed by subordinate instruments, several of them sub-delegated and one notified under a different parent statute. This article asks whether that delegation withstands constitutional scrutiny and, more usefully, where the real locus of judicial control now lies. It argues that India’s excessive-delegation doctrine, deliberately permissive since In re Delhi Laws Act, will almost certainly sustain the facial validity of the delegation, because the doctrine demands only discernible policy and guidance, which the Amendment’s climate objectives supply. The constitutionally significant questions therefore migrate downstream, to the review of the rules themselves, where Indian law remains under-theorised and its fora fragmented. Combining doctrinal analysis with a structured mapping of where each essential policy variable resides in the regulatory cascade, the article contends that market-constituting delegated instruments warrant a more exacting review than ordinary implementing rules; that procedural discipline (statutory consultation, reasoned response, and meaningful legislative laying) must supply the constraint that the delegation gateway does not; and that the Energy Conservation Act’s omission from Schedule I of the National Green Tribunal Act splits review of a single integrated instrument between the writ courts and the specialised environmental tribunal in a way that serves neither expertise nor coherence. Comparative reference to the United States’ major-questions doctrine and the European Union’s treatment of the Emissions Trading Scheme sharpens, without dictating, the prescription.

Abstract. Child criminology occupies a distinctive position within the broader discipline of criminology because children and adolescents who come into conflict with law cannot be understood merely through the conventional concept of criminal responsibility. Juvenile delinquency is influenced by a combination of individual, psychological, familial, social, economic and environmental circumstances. The Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2015 represents an important shift in Indian juvenile justice policy from a predominantly punitive understanding of juvenile offending towards a framework based on care, protection, development, rehabilitation, restoration and social reintegration. The Act recognises two principal categories of children: children in conflict with law and children in need of care and protection. It creates specialised institutions such as the Juvenile Justice Board, the Child Welfare Committee and the Children’s Court to respond to these categories through child-sensitive procedures. The Act also introduces a distinctive mechanism for children between sixteen and eighteen years of age alleged to have committed heinous offences, through a preliminary assessment by the Juvenile Justice Board. At the same time, the legislative framework does not abandon the rehabilitative philosophy of juvenile justice. The concepts of the best interest of the child, institutional and non-institutional rehabilitation, foster care, adoption, restoration and individual care planning demonstrate the Act’s attempt to address the causes and consequences of juvenile offending. This article examines juvenile delinquency through major criminological theories, including classical, positivist, psychological, social learning, strain, social disorganisation, differential association, labelling and control theories. It then evaluates how these theoretical perspectives correspond with the institutional design and rehabilitative philosophy of the 2015 Act. The article argues that an effective juvenile justice system must understand offending behaviour as a developmental and social phenomenon and must balance accountability with the possibility of reform, while ensuring public safety and the dignity and rights of children.