NLSIU is organising a Webinar Conversation with Global Policy Experts on the theme ‘Can Knowing the Law make better Public Policy?’ on February 8, 2026 from 6 to 7 pm.

About the Session

Effective ideas and interventions in public policy attract financial resources, people and the time to organise operations. But the question that confronts them is who, how and why should the government authorize such actions, if we want to scale? Acceptance is easier than authorisation. Having garnered the evidence, is knowing the law an important but often ignored step to transition from theory to practice?

Join this conversation with three experts in the policy field – a public policy educator with a global development policy expert and a corporate and tech policy leader – to unpack this question. This webinar will particularly be useful to law students, professionals and other students looking to transition to public policy practice.

Speakers

Dr. Srikrishna Ayyangar

Srikrishna Ayyangar, is the Chair of the Master’s in Public Policy Programme at NLSIU, Bengaluru. Trained as a political scientist, he has been a public policy educator for more than a decade in India, having graduated from the Maxwell School at Syracuse University. His interests are in populism and case study methodologies. He is also the co-convenor of the Comparative Case Study Group at the Methods.Net community hosted by the University of Louvain, Belgium.

 

Ronald Abraham

Ronald co-founded IDinsight and has been leading its growth in India for over a decade. Today, IDinsight’s 250+ staff across Asia and Africa help governments and nonprofits use data and evidence to make better decisions.

Ronald is currently building Veeraa, a crowdfunding and growth platform for India’s community leaders. He has also served as CEO of Jan Suraaj Foundation (JSF) and under his leadership, JSF built an active network of over 25,000 youth across Bihar. Earlier in his career, Ronald worked with Pratham, India’s largest education nonprofit, coordinating the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) and co-leading a statewide learning program with the Government of Punjab.

Ronald holds a BA (Honours) in Economics from St. Stephen’s College, Delhi University, and an MPA in International Development (MPA/ID) from Harvard Kennedy School, where he was a recipient of the Joint Japan/World Bank Graduate Scholarship.

Shimal Kapoor

Shimal Kapoor is a law and public policy professional with nearly a decade of experience working at the intersection of governance, regulation, and technology. Shimal began her career as a LAMP Fellow at the Parliament of India and later served as a Judicial Clerk at the Supreme Court of India, before contributing to governance projects at the World Bank during her Master’s in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. Since her master’s, Shimal has worked on public policy engagements for leading technology companies like Meta and Probo, focussing on privacy, content regulation, online safety, online gaming, telecom laws, AI governance, and digital competition.

NLSIU is organising a talk on ‘Closing the Gap between Rights and Justice’ by Prof. Maya Unnithan, Professor of Social and Medical Anthropology at the University of Sussex on January 16, 2026 at 11.10 am.

Abstract 

A human rights-based approach provides a significant framework with which to conceptualise and advance change in systems where gender inequality and injustice permeate. However, there are often gaps between a rights-based approach and the realisation of justice. In the talk, Professor Unnithan will draw on insights from on-the-ground engagement with legal processes and reproductive rights, feminist scholarship on justice, as well as Amartya Sen’s ideas on the moral basis of justice, to suggest new ways of imagining rights which capture everyday complexities in an inclusive frame of reproductive justice.

About the Speaker 

Maya Unnithan is a Professor of Social and Medical Anthropology at the University of Sussex, working at the intersections of reproduction, global health, international development, and human rights. Her early scholarship, articulated in the monograph Gender, Poverty and Identity: New Perspectives on Caste and Tribe in Rajasthan (1997), provides a rich ethnographic account of the kinship, caste and gender politics in northern India. From 2000s onwards, her research has focussed on biopolitics, notions of body-self, and bodily autonomy in the reproductive life course, health governance and activism in India and UK (with reference to infertility, contraception, assisted reproductive technologies, surrogacy, abortion, and prenatal sex selection). These concerns are developed in her later monograph Fertility, Health and Reproductive Politics: Reimagining Rights in India (2019).

At the University of Sussex, she also  leads the Centre for Cultures of Reproduction, Technologies and Health (CORTH).

The JSW Centre for the Future of Law at NLSIU is organising two official Pre-Summit Events of the India AI Impact Summit 2026 at the University campus in January. The events are being organised with the support of Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET).

January 17, 2026 | 10:30 AM – 12:00 PM | Conference Hall, Training Centre

Keynote Address by Dr. Akash Kapur, Visiting Research Scholar and Lecturer, Princeton University
Hybrid mode | Open to the public (RSVP here)

In this session titled “AI in the Global South: DPI as an AI Governance Approach”, Dr. Akash Kapur will be talking about AI Governance in the Global South, with a focus on India and how a DPI-led approach to AI fits into overall global approaches.

About the Speaker

Dr. Akash Kapur is a Visiting Research Scholar and Lecturer whose work at Princeton focusses on digital public infrastructure (DPI). As part of this work, he examines the global dissemination of technology and governance frameworks for digital identity, payments, and data exchange. He is researching the intersections of DPI and artificial intelligence (AI), in particular by considering open source and public models. Kapur is also a Senior Fellow at The GovLab, where he works on data policy and Internet governance; and a Senior Fellow at New America, where he focusses on global AI governance.

He’s also a former columnist for the New York Times, and has written for various publications, including The New Yorker, the Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The Economist, Granta, Foreign Policy, The Hindu, Outlook, and more. Among other topics, he writes about utopia, technology policy and regulation, and tennis.

January 24, 2026 | 10:30 AM – 12:30 PM | Conference Hall, Training Centre

Panel discussion on AI Governance in the Global South
Hybrid mode | Open to the public (RSVP here) 

The Centre will be hosting a panel on adoption of the India AI Governance Guidelines and the Global South. The session will be regarding AI Governance in light of the new Guidelines released in India. The discussion will also regard broader AI Governance patterns in the global south. The discussions will feature experts across industry, policy and academia.

The programme will also feature allied discussions on the transformation of the regulatory landscape covering emergent use cases for Generative AI tools in automation, and address ethical and professional responsibilities regarding access and bias.

Panellists: 

• Mr. Amlan Mohanty, Non-Resident Fellow at Niti Aayog
• Mr. Prakash Narayanan, Global General Counsel, L&T Technology Services (LTTS)
• Ms. Eunice Huang, Head of AI and Emerging Tech Policy, Asia Pacific, Google
• Mr. Jaideep Reddy, Partner, Trilegal
• Prof. (Dr.) Sudhir Krishnaswamy, Vice-Chancellor, NLSIU
• Dr. Rahul Hemrajani, Assistant Professor of Law – Moderator

In this week’s faculty seminar, NLSIU is hosting Ian Loader, Professor of Criminology and Professorial Fellow of All Souls College, University of Oxford, on campus on January 14, 2026. He will deliver a lecture on the topic ‘Beyond motonormative punishment: On road safety as environmental regulation.’

Abstract

Criminology has long had a blind-spot concerning road safety. The field tends to accept that the problem is best left to technical specialists; treats road safety as somehow separate from its focal concerns with public safety; and reproduces an ideology of streets as distinct socio-juridical spaces. In so doing, criminology leaves unaddressed a significant dimension of one its core issues: how to create safe and liveable urban environments. In this paper, I set out one path via which to unsettle these distinctions. I begin with a brief historical and geographic sketch of the forms of harm and violence associated with car-dominant mobility systems. I then offer a critique of what I term motonormative punishment – a regime of legal sanctions and culture of blame that focuses on the individualised responsibility of a minority of ‘careless’ or ‘dangerous’ drivers while accommodating the structural violence generated by systems of automobility. I argue, instead, for theorizing road safety in terms of diffused responsibility between actors and hybrid actants in a system. It follows, I conclude, that we should radically decentre criminal punishment as a response to road violence in favour of forms of environmental regulation organised around five harm reduction principles: diversion, design, distributed agency, deliberative learning, and the disassembly of dangerous actants.

About the Speaker

Besides being faculty at the Oxford University, Prof. Ian Loader is also an Honorary Professorial Fellow in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society for the Arts.

He is the author of numerous books, edited collections, theoretical and empirical papers, and works of civic engagement on security, public and private policing; sensibilities towards dis/order and justice; penal policy and culture; crime control and political ideologies, and the democratic purposes of criminology. His current work coalesces around aspects of environmental harm.

Prof. Ian is presently in receipt of a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship (2025-2028) for a project entitled ‘Car harms: Automobility and the objects of criminology’. The project seeks to use the car, and systems of automobility, as a vehicle through which to explore what it means practice criminology in the midst of a climate breakdown. Ian is also teaching a graduate seminar on ‘Criminology and the car’.

The Centre for Health Law Policy and Ethics, NLSIU, is hosting a talk on ‘The Evolving Challenge of Antimicrobial Resistance and Opportunities for International Law to Address It’ by Steven J. Hoffman, Professor of Global Health, Law, and Political Science at York University, Canada, on January 15, 2026.

About the Talk

Antimicrobial resistance is associated with 1 million deaths in India each year and 4.95 million deaths worldwide – yet this global health challenge is only getting worse. In his talk, Professor Steven J. Hoffman from York University in Canada will unpack the root social causes driving the spread of drug-resistant infections and explore opportunities for using public international law to address the collective action problems that currently disincentivize governmental action.

About the Speaker

Steven J. Hoffman is a Professor of Global Health, Law, and Political Science, York University, Canada and a Founder / Investigator at Global Strategy Lab. His research has recently focussed on the international legal dimensions of antimicrobial resistance, for which he works closely with the World Health Organization as Co-Director of their WHO Collaborating Centre on Global Governance of Antimicrobial Resistance.

We are delighted to host Mr. A.S. Ponanna, Senior Advocate, Member of the Karnataka Legislative Assembly, and Legal Advisor to the Hon’ble Chief Minister of Karnataka, at the NLS campus on Monday, January 12, 2026.

His talk, titled “Elections, the Rule of Law, and Democratic Governance,” will be held from 2 to 4 pm at NAB 101, and is being facilitated by Prof. Muhammad Ali Khan, who teaches the elective Introduction to Election Law at the University.

Abstract

Governance today is shaped by the growing convergence of law and public policy, with lawyers increasingly engaging as advisors, drafters, and institutional actors alongside policymakers. Drawing on his experience as a senior advocate, legislator, and legal advisor to the Chief Minister, Mr. Ponanna will reflect on the expanding role of public policy professionals and the new professional pathways this creates for lawyers.

The lecture will also examine the evolution of Indian election law over the past decade, highlighting key judicial and regulatory developments and their impact on democratic governance. The talk will also address the emerging roles for lawyers and public policy minded professionals in election-related litigation, advisory work, policy formulation, and institutional reform.

The NLSIU Library Committee is organising a panel discussion with Prof. (Dr.) Meera Nanda on January 13, 2026. The discussion will focus on Dr. Nanda’s recent work on the convergences between Hindu nationalism and postcolonial theory.

Panellists: Prof. (Dr.) Meera Nanda, Prof. (Dr.) Nigam Nuggehalli, Prof. (Dr.) V S Elizabeth, and Dr. Dayal Paleri

Moderator: Dr. Parashar Kulkarni

The event is open to the public. Registration is mandatory for the non-NLS community. RSVP here.

About The Panellists and Moderator

Prof. (Dr.) Meera Nanda is a historian of science and the author of several works critiquing the influence of Hindutva, postcolonialism and postmodernism on science, and the rising trends of pseudoscience and vedic science. Prof. Nanda taught History of Science at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) Mohali from 2009 to 2017. Her best known books are Breaking the Spell of Dharma and Other Essays (2002), Prophets Facing Backward: Postmodern Critiques of Science and Hindu Nationalism in India (2004), The God Market (2010), and Science in Saffron: Skeptical Essays on History of Science (2016) and most recently A Field Guide to Post-Truth India (Three Essays Collective, 2024) and Postcolonial Theory and the Making of Hindu Nationalism: The Wages of Unreason (Routledge, 2025).

Prof. (Dr.) Nigam Nuggehalli is a Professor of Law at the National Law School of India University, Bengaluru. Prof. Nigam was appointed as Chair Professor, Department of Revenue Chair in September 2025. Prior to this appointment, he served as the Registrar of NLSIU since August 2021, where he was responsible for the administration of the University. He brings with him nearly three decades of academic and professional experience as a taxation law specialist. Before joining academia, he worked as a tax lawyer in New York and is a member of the New York Bar and the India Bar (Karnataka).

Prof. (Dr.) V. S. Elizabeth is a Professor of History at the National Law School of India University, Bengaluru. Prof. Elizabeth has taught core courses in history and elective courses on understanding sexual violence against women and state responses to it through feminist lenses, among others. Between December 2019 and June 2023, she served as the Vice-Chancellor of the Tamil Nadu National Law University, Tiruchirappalli. Prof. Elizabeth’s research interest in history is the socio-economic changes that took place in the early medieval kingdoms of South India. Since joining NLSIU however, she has researched and published on legal issues that have affected women, particularly on violence against women, both domestic and sexual violence.

Dr. Dayal Paleri is an Assistant Professor, Social Sciences at the National Law School of India University, Bengaluru. Dr. Paleri was previously a Commonwealth Split-site PhD fellow at the Department of Religious Studies, University of Edinburgh, UK, and a recipient of the Institute Research (IR) Award for Excellence in PhD Research by the Dean Academic Research at IIT Madras. His research interests include Indian Politics and Governance, Political Sociology of Religion and Nonreligion, Peace Studies, New Atheism, and State and Civil Society in Postcolonial Kerala.

Dr. Parashar Kulkarni is an Associate Professor, Centre for the Study of Social Inclusion (CSSI) at the National Law School of India University, Bengaluru. Dr. Kulkarni studies religion, political economy, and utopias in colonial and contemporary India and the British Empire. His work has appeared in literary and academic journals such as Granta, Boston Review, The Sociological Review Magazine, Labor History, Explorations in Economic History and Social Science History. Prior to joining NLSIU, he was Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Advanced and Legal Studies, University College London, and an Assistant Professor at Yale-NUS College, Singapore where he taught for nine years. He was also an Adjunct Instructor at the New York University.

We are pleased to host Justice Zakeria Mohammed Yacoob, Retired Judge, Constitutional Court of South Africa, and Mrs. Anuradha Yacoob from January 5-11, 2026. He served as a Judge in the Constitutional Court from 1998-2013, earning distinction as one of the Court’s most principled voices on equality, human dignity and social justice. Justice Yacoob, who self identifies as blind since childhood, stands as a powerful testament to intellectual resilience and moral courage. He played a direct role in shaping South Africa’s constitutional future and was an active participant in the anti-apartheid struggle.

During his stay at NLS, he will be interacting with various members of the NLS community through the following events:

Schedule

January 6, 2026 | 11.10 am – 1 pm
OAB 101

Session with LLM Students (Open to the NLS community only)
Comparative Public Law and Governance
Instructor: NLS faculty Mr. Sidharth Chauhan.

Justice Yacoob will address the postgraduate students about his experiences on the Constitutional Court of South Africa, with a special emphasis on how they engaged with foreign legal materials in their reasoning and decision-making.

January 6, 2026 | 6 pm – 7.30 pm
Bangalore International Centre (BIC), Domlur

Public Meeting – An informal interaction between Justice Yacoob and city-based lawyers, researchers and students. Organised by the Centre for Law and Policy Research. (Open to the public)  

January 7, 2026 | 2-3.30 pm
Conference room, Training Centre (TC)

Interaction with NLSIU faculty members across law, social sciences and public policy clusters. (Open to NLS faculty only)  

January 8, 2026 | 9 am to 10.50 am
OAB 201, Krishnappa Hall

Session with 3rd year BA LLB (Hons) Students (Open to the NLS community only)
Human Rights Law and Practice Course
Instructors: NLS faculty Dr. Sanjay Jain, Dr. Siddharth Narrain and Mr. Arvind Narrain.

Abstract

Justice Yacoob delivered the landmark Government of South Africa v Grootboom decision, in which the Court laid down that policy on housing can be tested for its constitutionality based on whether it conformed to the requirement of having taken ‘reasonable legislative and other measures, within its available resources, to achieve the progressive realisation of this right.’

Based on this, the Court struck down the housing policy of the Cape Metropolitan Council on the ground that failed to make & ‘reasonable provision’ for those with ‘no access to land, no roof over their heads and who were living in intolerable conditions or crisis situations.’

What happened at the ground level post the delivery of the judgment? How can we evaluate the status of the right to housing in South African twenty-five years after Grootboom? How does the trajectory in South African with its constitutionally guaranteed right to housing compare with India where there is no such recognition? To facilitate a point of comparison, Dr. Sanjay Jain will discuss the judgment of Justice Murlidhar in Ajay Maken v Union of India (2019) to facilitate a comparison.

January 10, 2026

Off-campus visits and interactions with interested faculty, students and research staff.

For more information on these sessions, please write to  

 

The Green Room invites you to a play reading of The Coffin is Too Big for the Hole by Kuo Pao Kun (a short one-act play) on January 7, 2026. The session will take place from 5 –7 pm and take the form of a table read followed by a discussion.

Joining this discussion will be Ms. Mayura Baweja, an NLS alumna (BALLB ’95), theatre director (Fernando and His Grandmother) and actor (Queen Mother in Girish Karnad’s Bali: The Sacrifice).

About the Play

The Coffin is Too Big for the Hole is a sharp, darkly comic play that centres on a seemingly mundane problem: a coffin that does not fit the government’s standard-sized grave. As officials argue over procedure and responsibility, the play unfolds into a critique of institutional rigidity, indifference, and the erosion of human dignity beneath rules and paperwork.

The play features multiple characters, and we will be holding a table read during the session. We are looking for volunteers to read the roles—no prior experience required.  Those interested may reach out to the student coordinator, Aaditi [].

About the Playwright

Kuo Pao Kun (1939–2002) is widely regarded as the father of modern Singaporean theatre. Writing across languages and theatrical traditions, his work engages deeply with questions of identity, migration, memory, and the quiet violences of bureaucracy and modern life. His plays often blend the personal with the political, employing minimalism, symbolism, and irony to reflect on belonging and displacement in postcolonial societies.

We ended this term’s faculty seminars with a special lecture by Dr. Ewan Smith, Associate Professor of Public Law at UCL on the ‘Devolution after Empire.’

About the Article

This article questions the claim that the UK is a unitary state. It argues that the UK was, and perhaps is, an Empire. Empires are states in which questions of subsidiarity are inescapable and ongoing. Like unitary states, they have a supreme central government. Unlike unitary states, Empires are not governed as a single entity. The United Kingdom is not a state where all parts bear a singular relationship to the centre. Instead, it embraces a multiplicity of constitutional relationships, overlaid by sovereignty and the Crown. The nature of the UK territory was ambiguous under Empire. It still is, and the article explores how imperial structures continue to influence our devolution settlement. The British constitution ultimately managed to resolve very-large-scale questions of subsidiarity in a global Empire. It remains to be seen whether that same structure can resolve small-scale questions of subsidiarity in a supposedly unitary state.

About the Speaker

Dr. Ewan Smith joined UCL Laws as Associate Professor of Public Law in 2022. Prior to that he was a Fellow of Christ Church, Oxford, the Shaw Foundation Junior Research Fellow at Jesus College, Oxford, and an Early Career Fellow at the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights. Ewan read law at Oxford, at the University of Paris and at Harvard Law School. In 2023 Ewan was a Hauser Fellow at New York University Law School and in 2024 he was a Visiting Professor at Faculty of Law of the University of Bologna. In 2026 he will be a visiting professor at the National University of Singapore. He has previously worked at Peking, Tsinghua and Renmin Universities in China and between 2005 and 2015 he worked for the UK Foreign Office. Ewan’s work considers how political rules govern powerful institutions, how law shapes foreign relations, and compares the constitutional orders of China, the UK and the United States. He is admitted to practice in New York