The ‘Bare Act’ is an expression used to specify the content of 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 enactment of law, however, is less a matter of reading the letter of the law, and more a matter of augmenting or eroding its textual foundation through the acts of interpretation, negotiation, disputation and witnessing. The law, and practices within and outside it, stand in relation to a meta-legal domain that can be said to embrace acts and actions in all their depth, intensity and substantive generality. This too is a stage set for the performance of ‘bare acts’, of what we might call ‘naked deeds’ – actions shorn of everything other than what is contained in a verb. The ‘Bare Act’ that encrypts the letter of the law, the wire frame structure that demands the fleshing out of interpretation, and the ‘bare act’ that expresses and contains the stripped-down kernel of an act, of something that is done, are both expressions that face each other in a relationship of tense reflection and intimate alterity. Bare Acts generate bare acts, and vice versa. With this book we hope to consolidate and take forward a process of considered examination of this troubled mirror image.
Bare act consists only on the sections and not on the commentary, judgements and case laws.