NLSIU’s Library Committee is organising a Book Talk on the book Copyright as Personal Property, authored by Dr. Poorna Mysoor and published by the Oxford University Press. The talk will take place at the Ground Floor Conference Hall, NLSIU Training Centre, on Friday, January 9, 2026, at 5 PM. Dr. Poorna Mysoor will be in conversation with NLSIU’s Prof. (Dr.) Arul George Scaria.

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

About the Book

Copyright statutes in many jurisdictions clearly state that copyright is a property right. However, it is not always clear exactly how. Some see it as no more than a statutory right, while others think of it as a chose in action, like debts or shares. Copyright as Personal Property demonstrates why it is incorrect to conceptualise copyright as a chose in action and argues that, despite being an intangible asset, copyright is more analogous to land and chattels.

The book aims to achieve two main objectives. The first is to demonstrate much against popular belief that the analogies with land and chattels help contain the scope of copyright within normatively justifiable limits. Starting with the “thing relatedness” of copyright, the monograph draws parallels with the acquisition of copyright, the nature of exclusionary rights, exclusive powers and privileges, their enforcement, and derivative interests. It employs concepts of property theory, such as numerus clausus, to provide the necessary benchmark to guide the boundaries of copyright. The second objective is to challenge the rigid and binary classification of property rights into choses in possession and choses in action. By addressing an important evolutionary gap in the conceptualization of property rights, this work lays the groundwork for a more sophisticated taxonomy, viewing property rights as existing on a spectrum. It goes on to provide the metrics to calibrate this spectrum, ensuring the incremental and orderly development of property rights.

Original and thought-provoking, the analogy this book develops with land and chattels shows how the unjustifiable expansion of copyright can be curbed and offers a more sophisticated classification of property rights than that based simply on tangibility.

About the Panellists

Dr. Poorna Mysoor is a Fellow in Law at Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge. She is also a member of Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law at the Faculty of Law, University of Cambridge. She was a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow at the Faculty of Law, University of Oxford, a Junior Research Fellow at the Queen’s College, Oxford, and an academic member at the Oxford Intellectual Property Research Centre. She is the author of two books, Copyright as Personal Property (2025) and Implied Licences in Copyright Law (2021), both published with Oxford University Press, and has published her work widely in reputed journals and edited collections. Poorna obtained her undergraduate law degree at NLSIU, Bangalore, and an LLM from SOAS, University of London for which she was awarded the Felix Scholarship. Before embarking on her doctorate, Poorna practised intellectual property law for several years in Hong Kong and was a litigator in India.

Prof. (Dr.) Arul George Scaria is a Professor of Law and Co-Director, Centre for IP Research and Advocacy (CIPRA) at the National Law School of India University, Bengaluru. His expertise lies in intellectual property and competition law. He teaches, researches, and writes on issues at the intersection of law, science, and technology. Prof. Arul has been a lead researcher in different research projects, including an UNESCO funded project on challenges and opportunities for open science in four South Asian countries. He has two single authored books to his credit – Piracy in the Indian Film Industry: Copyright and Cultural Consonance (Cambridge University Press, 2014) and Ambush Marketing: Game within a Game (Oxford University Press, 2008).

NLSIU’s Library Committee is organising a poetry reading with Dr. Mani Rao, author of the anthology So That You Know (Harper Collins 2025). The reading will take place at the NLS Library Basement on Monday, January 5, 2026, at 4 PM.

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

About the Poet

Dr. Mani Rao is the author of thirteen poetry books including So That You Know (Harper Collins 2025), and four books in translation including Bhagavad Gita and Saundarya Lahari. Researching mantra experience in tantric communities, she discovered continuing revelations and new mantras in circulation on-ground for Living Mantra: Mantra, Deities and Visionary Experience Today.

After studying literature in the early 80’s Madras, she worked as an advertising and television professional for two decades in Mumbai, New Zealand and Hong Kong. A resetting of life-goals led her back to the world of learning – she then did an MFA from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, USA, and a PhD in Religious Studies from Duke University, USA. Returning to India by 2017, she began to live in Puttaparthi and Bangalore.

The National Law School of India University is organising a public lecture on ‘Temporary Lives: Law, Ruination, And The Right To Dwell In Lagos’ by Daniel E. Agbiboa, John & Ruth Hazel Associate Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University on January 12, 2026.

Temporary Lives: Law, Ruination, And The Right To Dwell In Lagos

Across the Global South, urban eviction is increasingly justified in the language of climate adaptation, risk management, and development. Drawing on Agbiboa’s book-in-progress, ‘Dredged Lives: Futures and Foreclosures in an African City,’ this talk examines how such rationales operate in Lagos, Nigeria, where waterfront communities are routinely demolished in the name of  environmental safety, urban renewal, or megacity ambition. Agbiboa argues that these clearances are not failures of governance but deliberate techniques of rule. They take the form of self devouring growth and bureaucratic violence that convert land into speculative value by  rendering certain lives temporary.

Focussing on precarious waterfront communities, Agbiboa traces how law functions less as protection and more as performance. Court orders are ignored, notices are withheld, and legality is retroactively rewritten. In this context, eviction is not an exception but a governing rationality. Risk becomes an alibi, informality a weapon, and uncertainty itself a mode of control.

The talk also examines how residents insist on presence through staying put, rebuilding on rubble, mapping themselves into visibility, and crafting alternative plans for urban life, even when legal remedies fail. These practices constitute what Agbiboa calls ‘refusal without redemption,’ a politics oriented not toward final resolution but toward present-oriented survival and the  labor of carrying on regardless.

By bringing Lagos into conversation with broader debates on climate urbanism, law, displacement, and urban citizenship, the talk invites reflection on a pressing question for legal scholarship. What does justice look like when law itself governs through dispossession, and what forms of political life persist when redemption through law is no longer available?

About the Speaker

Daniel E. Agbiboa is Associate Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, where he also serves as Faculty Associate of the Weatherhead Centre for International Affairs, Affiliate Faculty of the Bloomberg Centre for Cities, and Co-Chair of the Urban Conversation Series in the Mahindra Humanities Center.

Prof. Agbiboa’s research focuses on the intersection of violence and order, urban governance, mobility and mobilisation, environmental politics, empire and African subjectivity. His works are grounded in discourse analysis, mobile ethnography, and a critical ethnography of the state. He is the author of They Eat Our Sweat: Transport Labor, Corruption and Everyday Survival in Urban Nigeria (Oxford University Press, 2022) and Mobility, Mobilisation and Counter/Insurgency: The Routes of Terror in an African Context; editor of Transport, Transgression and Politics in African Cities: The Rhythm of Chaos (Routledge, 2019); and co-editor of People, Predicaments and Potentials in Africa (Langaa RPCIG).

He is the recipient of several prestigious (book and article) awards, including the Lee Ann Fujii Book Award given by the International Studies Association (ISA); the ISA Peace Best Book Award; finalist for both the Society for Economic Anthropology (SEA) Best Book Prize and the Global Development Studies (GDS) Best Book Award; the Politics and Gender Best Article Award given by editors of Politics and Gender journal (published by Cambridge University Press) and the Women, Gender and Politics Section of APSA; and the 2023 James F. Short Jr. Distinguished Article Award (Honorable Mention) given by the Crime, Law and Deviance Section of the American Sociological Association. In 2023, Professor Agbiboa received the Clarence Stone Scholar Award, given by the Urban and Politics Section of the American Political Science Association (APSA) for his significant contributions to the study of urban politics. He has been a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars, recipient of the Guggenheim Distinguished Scholar Award, and holder of the CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholar Award (2024-2026). He currently serves on the Editorial Board of the African Studies Review and the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, where he also serves as a Trustee.

The HUPA Chair on Urban Poor and the Law at NLSIU is organising a talk on ‘Hidden Precarities: Debt and Embodied Risk in Urban Uttarakhand, India’ by Dr. Smitha Radhakrishnan from Wellesley College, US, on January 8, 2026.

About the Speaker

Dr. Smitha Radhakrishnan is the Marion Butler McLean Professor in the History of Ideas and Professor of Sociology at Wellesley College in the United States. She is the author most recently of Making Women Pay: Microfinance in Urban India (2022) and The Gender Order of Neoliberalism (with Cinzia D. Solari, 2023). An award-winning feminist sociologist focussed on questions of finance, development, and labour, Dr. Radhakrishnan is currently studying household debt and moneylending in the contexts of India, South Africa, and the United States.

About the Talk

How might the experiences of low wage workers in contemporary India clarify conceptualisations of precarity developed primarily in global North contexts? This paper departs from an employment-oriented understanding of precarity to center the bodies and narratives of men and women workers who take loans in order to make ends meet. Drawing from 188 interviews with low-wage workers in the highly financialised state of Uttarakhand, India, we conceptualise precarity as embodied risk. We identify a continuum of embodied risk resulting from a combination of formal and informal loans, ranging from mental strain to the loss of belongings to ill health or premature death. Leveraging a social reproduction framework sensitive to caste and gender, we find that workers experience intensified embodied risk when taking high-interest loans from private moneylenders to meet pressing expenses, a phenomenon known as distress financing. Our analysis first examines how informal and formal loans accessible to low wage workers put the bodies of workers on the line in different ways. Then, through a close examination of a subset of workers, we explore the key mechanisms through which borrowing intensifies embodied risk for some workers and their families more than others. Caste, gender, household composition, and migrant status, all intersect to shape embodied risk. This intersectional understanding of precarity draws attention to the constitutive links between moneylending, financialisation, and social reproduction in contemporary India. We call for both state-led and community-led efforts to shore up diverse forms of social protection.