‘Coups & Constitutions’ | Talk by NLS Alum Mr. Vikram Raghavan, Lead Counsel at World Bank

On Friday, 11th August, 2023, Mr. Vikram Raghavan, NLS BA LLB 1997, will be presenting a talk on ‘Coups & Constitutions’. Vikram is the Lead Counsel at World Bank, Washington DC.

In this presentation, Vikram will focus on constitutional crises in countries ranging from Afghanistan, Myanmar, Sudan, and Niger. These crises arise from military coups, contested elections, and other extra-constitutional changes in governments. He will explore the international legal dimensions of these crises and examine how states and international organizations respond to these crises. Prof. Aparna Chandra will be the discussant.

About the speaker:

Vikram’s work covers a wide range of subjects: the Bank’s mandate and its Articles of Agreement, loan conditionality, post-conflict reconstruction, refugees and forced displacement, humanitarian crises, coups, sanctions, contractual disputes, expropriation, graduation, and sovereign debt. In over two-decades of his career at the Bank, he has worked on projects in many countries. They include Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, India, Mali, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, Philippines, Somalia, South Sudan, Sri Lanka, Yemen, and the West Bank and Gaza. He also works on legal and policy issues arising from the Bank’s engagements in countries affected by conflict, fragility, and violence. He  was a team member for the Bank’s flagship publication, the 2011 World Development Report Conflict, Security, and Development. He is also part of the team for the 2023 World Development Report on migration and forced displacement. He received the Bank’s Bretton Woods@75
award for his contributions to preserving the Bank’s institutional memory.

Before the World Bank, he was an associate at New York office of the international law firm, O’Melveny and Myers. He also co-founded the legal blog Law and Other Things. He is an active member of the American Society of International Law and has served on its executive council. He is particularly passionate about mentoring law students and junior lawyers and spends part of his vacation each year visiting new law schools to talk to students.

Published Work: His first book was Communications Law in India (2006) which has been cited by the Supreme Court of India. He has co-edited Comparative Constitutionalism in South Asia (2010) a collection of essays by leading scholars. More recently, he edited George Gadbois’s Supreme Court of India: The Beginnings (2017). He is presently working on a narrative history of how India emerged as a constitutional republic in 1950.

This is a closed-doors event and open to the NLS community only.