The National Law School of India Review (NLSIR) and the Socio-Legal Review (SLR), student-edited journals of the National Law School of India University, Bengaluru, are co-organising an online panel discussion on 18th July 2026, 6:30 PM to 8:00 PM, to commemorate the life and work of the late Professor Marc Galanter. An influential scholar of law and society, he passed away on 14 April 2026.

Professor Robert Hayden, Professor Robert Moog, and Mr. Nick Robinson, close collaborators, peers, and interlocutors of Prof Galanter, will be discussing his contributions. The discussion will be moderated by Dr. Sidharth Chauhan. The panel discussion is open to all. It will be followed by an audience Q&A round with the panellists.

Please note that registration is mandatory.

About Professor Galanter

Professor Marc Galanter was a scholar of public law, South Asian law, law and religion, and socio-legal studies. His engagement with Indian law and society dates as far back as 1957, when he enrolled at the University of Delhi on a Fulbright Scholarship to study untouchability and its abolition. Professor Galanter’s career and the Indian legal system developed alongside each other, with his work playing a major role in shaping law in the country. Indian courts, legislators, and lawyers alike have treated Professor Galanter’s work, which ranges from caste and reservation to alternative justice mechanisms, as instructive.

Professor Galanter’s shared history with NLSIU, having served on the first Expert Panel, which reviewed the university’s performance and suggested a roadmap ahead, makes this discussion especially relevant. He also authored a Foreword titled ‘The Inscrutable Future of the Indian Legal Profession’ for the university’s student-authored diversity report The Elusive Island of Excellence.

About the Panellists and Moderator

Professor Robert Hayden is a legal and political anthropologist, and Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and Law at the University of Pittsburgh. His doctoral research brought him to India, where his ethnography focussed on dispute settlements before caste panchayats. He was Professor Galanter’s student at the Buffalo Law School. He has worked extensively on religion and culture, communal conflict, and nationalism and constitutionalism in socialist and post-socialist societies.

Professor Robert Moog is a political scientist, and Professor Emeritus at North Carolina State University, where he also served as the Chair of the Department of Political Science. His work focuses on South Asian justice systems, environmental politics, and electoral processes, judicial politics in the United States, and higher education in Turkey. Professor Moog has on various occasions credited Professor Galanter as being influential to his own work.

Mr. Nick Robinson is a lawyer and legal academic, whose work has extensively focused on the Indian legal system. His areas of expertise include empirical legal studies, counter-terrorism laws, the legal profession, and judicial systems. He has previously clerked under the Chief Justice of India, served as Assistant Professor at Jindal Global Law School, and held a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard Law School.

Dr. Sidharth Chauhan is an Assistant Professor of Law at NLSIU. His research expertise lies in the field of public law, including constitutional law, as well as socio-legal studies, and law and literature studies. Professor Chauhan has previously worked as law clerk under the Chief Justice of India, after which he taught at NLSIU and later at NALSAR for 11 years. He has since returned to NLSIU, where he teaches courses on public law, legal methods, and administrative law.

About the Journals

NLSIR is the flagship student-edited law journal of NLSIU. Open-access and double-anonymous peer-reviewed, the journal is one of India’s oldest student-edited law reviews. It is now in its 38th year of publication. NLSIR occupies a distinctive place in Indian legal academia as a forum that has consistently sought to combine rigorous doctrinal analysis with broader normative and theoretical inquiry. Over the years, the journal has been cited by the Supreme Court of India on multiple occasions—in KS Puttaswamy v Union of India, Unaided Private Schools of Delhi v Director of Education, Union of India v M/s Mohit Minerals, and AMU v Naresh Agarwal.

SLR is an open-access, student-run, peer-reviewed journal that encourages interdisciplinary research at the intersection of law and social science. The journal is published by the National Law School of India University, Bengaluru. First published in 2005 with the help of a grant from the Modern Law Review, SLR has carried articles by luminaries in the field of law and society, such as Roger Cotterrell, WT Murphy, Werner Menski, Asghar Ali Engineer, Pratiksha Baxi, and Gina Heathcote. The journal has been cited by the Supreme Court of India on two occasions—in Justice Chandrachud’s opinion in Justice KS Puttaswamy and Anr v Union of India and Ors (2018) and by Justice Indu Malhotra and Justice Chandrachud in their respective opinions in Joseph Shine v Union of India (2018). SLR has also been cited by Justice Sudhanshu Dhulia of the High Court of Uttarakhand in Tanuja Tolia v State of Uttarakhand (2020).

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