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India secured its independence from the British rule in 1947. Vietnam eliminated the presence of foreign military forces in 1975. Both countries have faced adversity through subjugation. The similarity does not end here. The family unit in both nations is given primary precedence and importance, as it is considered to be the nucleus of the society. However, while Vietnam regulates matrimony through the uniform code of Law on Marriage and Family, 2014, India does not have a uniform code. India is a secular country where different religions are practiced freely. Matrimonial laws in India are governed by the personal laws of the parties depending on their religion, codified under different statutes, viz. Hindu Marriage Act, 1955; Muslim law; Indian Christian Marriage Act, 1872; Parsi Marriage and Divorce Act, 1936; and Special Marriage Act, 1954. This paper will compare the status of matrimonial laws in India and Vietnam with an attempt to answer the question as to whether it is advisable to reconcile different personal laws under a uniform code for India.

This paper focuses on the discourse on Muslim women’s rights in India, aiming to trace how policies concerning Muslim women affect their constitutional rights to equality and non-discrimination. In doing so, this paper explores a colonial continuity of policies in the post-independence era and the subsequent governments. The purpose of this paper is to provide an extensive and nuanced discussion on Muslim women’s rights in light of their historical evolution, the existence of personal laws, and the ongoing debates on a Uniform Civil Code. This article concludes that Muslim women continue to struggle for their rights to equal citizenship at the intersection of gender, religion, colonialism, and secularism.

The debate over the Uniform Civil Code (UCC) is mired in the conflict between the right to freedom of religion and the right to gender-based equality. The retraction of the UCC also hinges on legal pluralism. This paper argues for shifting the foci of the debate towards gender-based violence as rightly suggested by the feminist argument in India. In order to do so, this paper argues that the debate over the UCC needs to be restructured around the Due Diligence Obligation (DDO) to the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). This paper presents the argument that the absence of a UCC creates a normative vacuum that is currently filled by an intersubjective climate on patriarchy which primes the average Indian mindset. This intersubjective mindset requires to be replaced by the normative language of the DDO to the CEDAW. This process of norm effectuation also ties into the question of how international norms are implemented in domestic contexts and reiterates the causal chain propounded therein.

In India, with the change of political leadership at the center, the sanctity of religion-based Muslim family law has been contested. This has led to the development of a new socio-political discourse which is influenced and shaped by the basic feminist ideals of equal rights for women. In this discourse, Muslim women are portrayed as necessarily suffering from unjust family laws and needing immediate cover and protection from the secular state. In the light of the judicial reform which makes the practice of instant divorce through 'triple talaq' among Muslims a punishable offence, this article discusses that for Muslim women the domain of law is liminal and they choose between multiple legal forums to increase their access to justice. It explores how Muslim women approach different alternative forums, and in what ways Muslim women activists are creating an opportunity for the distressed women to resolve their marital disputes more efficiently. Such an examination provides important insights into how Muslim women's rights activists undertake their pursuit of justice within a complex, legally pluralistic landscape in the area of Muslim family law in India.

How can religious liberty be guaranteed in societies where religion pervades everyday life? In The Wheel of Law, Gary Jacobsohn addresses this dilemma by examining the constitutional development of secularism in India within an unprecedented cross-national framework that includes Israel and the United States. He argues that a country’s particular constitutional theory and practice must be understood within its social and political context. The experience of India, where religious life is in profound tension with secular democratic commitment, offers a valuable perspective not only on questions of jurisprudence and political theory arising in countries where religion permeates the fabric of society, but also on the broader task of ensuring religious liberty in constitutional polities.

This chapter examines the formation of the Indian state's approach to personal law in the first postcolonial decade. Policy makers maintained distinct personal laws, changed Hindu law alone although support for reform and levels of gender inequality were not lower among Muslims, and suggested that Hindu law reform was a step toward a homogeneous family law because they conceived the Indian nation and modern family primarily through their engagement with certain Hindu initiatives and traditions. They granted fault-based divorce rights, banned bigamy, accepted intercaste marriages, and extended women's right to inherit their parents’ separate intestate property to signal that they valued women's rights and conjugal autonomy. But concerns to maintain broad coalitions restrained them from giving women rights in jointly owned family property, decomposing joint property into individual shares, limiting testamentary rights, or enabling no-fault divorces. This maintained the authority of patrilineages and men in crucial ways.

The current design approach recommended by seismic codes is often based on the use of uniform-hazard response spectra, reduced to account for inelastic structural behaviour. This approach has some strong limitations that have been highlighted in many studies, including not allowing a direct control of the seismic risk and losses. This study aims at quantifying the levels of safety and the costs associated with this design approach, and to investigate alternative design approaches that have been developed in the last decades. In particular, a risk-targeting approach and a minimum-cost approach are considered. The first one, allowed by US codes, aims at designing structures with the same risk of collapse throughout regions of different seismicity. The second one aims to minimize the sum of the initial construction cost and the cost of expected losses due to future earthquakes. The comparison of the three approaches is performed by considering, as an example structure, a four-storey reinforced concrete frame building located in different areas in Europe, and by looking at the implications in terms of achieved safety levels, initial costs, and future losses. The study’s results provide useful information on how the design criteria and the different hazard levels throughout Europe affect the cost and safety levels of seismic design.

Open web steel beams are lightweight and economical flexural members designed for transverse as well as lateral loadings. Despite the fact that it is frequently utilised due to its multiple benefits, its behaviour remains unclear. This study focuses on the failure mechanism and the effect of different parameters on the capacity of an open web steel beam under non-uniform bending. Theoretical, experimental, and analytical studies were performed under a single point load applied at the centre of the span in order to study the behaviour of open web steel beams. A total of fifty nonlinear finite element (FE) models were analysed using the ABAQUS software package, and the behaviour of some models was verified experimentally. The local slenderness ratios distinguish different FE models. Results show similar types of failure patterns and load versus deflection graphs were obtained by analytical as well as experimental investigation, demonstrating a strong correlation between experimental and FE modelling. Along with the global behaviour, a different element of the member undergoing the local failure was noticed. The study examines the reasons for the various failure patterns and offers solutions based on observed behaviour patterns. Results conclude that an open web steel beam resolves one of the fundamental problems of lateral torsional buckling in slender flexural members.

The force distribution proposed by codes, which in many cases is framed in the equivalent static force procedure, likely leads to design structures with non-uniform drift distribution in terms of inter-storey drift and ductility demands. This can lead to an unbalanced drift demand at certain storeys. This phenomenon may also amass cyclic damage to the dissipative elements at this very storey, therefore increasing the probability of premature failure for low-cycle fatigue. This work proposes a new force design distribution that accounts for higher mode effects and limits the displacement concentration at any storey thus improving the dissipative capacity of the whole structures. The main advantage of the proposed method stands in its formulation, which allows to spare any previous set up with structural analyses. The proposed force distribution has been applied to multi-degree-of-freedom systems to check its effectiveness, and the results have been compared with other proposals. In addition, in order to obtain a further validation of the proposed force distribution, the results obtained by using a genetic algorithm have been evaluated and compared. Additionally, the results provided in this work validate the proposed procedure to develop a more efficient lateral load pattern.