NLS Faculty Awarded UCD Sutherland School of Law Doctoral Scholarship 2025 for Doctoral Studies
September 11, 2025
Aishwarya Birla, Assistant Professor of Law, NLSIU has been awarded the UCD Sutherland School of Law Doctoral Scholarship 2025 to pursue her PhD at the University College Dublin, Ireland.
About the Scholarship
The Sutherland School of Law offers a doctoral scholarship in law for the academic year that commences in September 2025. The aim of this scholarship is to attract applicants of the highest academic calibre to pursue a PhD in the UCD Sutherland School of Law, and to provide them with the training, experience and mentorship necessary to their research career development.
The scholarship is aimed at outstanding candidates who exceed the threshold criteria for admission to the PhD programme. Read more>>
Area of Research
In her proposed PhD project, Aishwarya hopes to study specifically the role of courts in India as a non-signatory state in engaging with, applying and creating refugee law and rights. While it is the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees that largely holds the field, it is not often studied with respect to its impact on non-refugee states. Given India’s unique history and participation in the drafting of the Convention, she believes that studying it in this context would have value for international refugee law at large.
She aims to study judicial creation of refugee and statelessness norms in India by focussing on case law from the higher judiciary. This would include looking at domestic engagement with international refugee norms, and domestic creation of refugee response norms. Materials used here will largely be case law, with some archival material, and scholarship on human rights, refugee rights, constitutional law, international law, and norm diffusion.
Her work will be supervised by Professor Cathryn Costello at the University.