News Type: Event

The NLS Library Committee is organising a Book Talk on the book Justice Making, Justice Spaces & Justice Users published by Goa 1556 in collaboration with Kokum Design Trust. The book is edited by Dean D’ Cruz, Reboni Saha, Siddhrath Peter de Souza, Varsha Aithala and Naomi Jose. The talk will take place at the Ground Floor Conference Hall at the NLSIU Training Centre at 4:15 pm on Monday, December 1, 2025.

This event is open to the public. Non-NLS guests are required to RSVP here.

About the book

The book reimagines how justice systems can be reshaped to better serve the people, especially those historically disadvantaged. Focussing on public spaces in Goa like courtrooms, police stations, protest sites, and classrooms, this collection brings together voices of practitioners, activists, and researchers to ask: How are these spaces structured, and what must change for them to truly support those seeking justice?

The book contains grounded case studies and thoughtful reflections from the digitalisation of courts to protest movements and planning law and aims to offer a compelling and people-centred vision of justice.

About the Panellists

• Varsha Aithala is an Assistant Professor of Law and a doctoral candidate at the National Law School of India University. Her doctoral work focusses on legal aid in India. She is a partner at Justice Adda, a law and design thinking based social enterprise. Her teaching and research interests cover areas of access to justice, law and technology and private law. Varsha has significant corporate practice experience in India and the United Kingdom. She is qualified as a solicitor in England and Wales and as an advocate in India.
• Dr. Siddharth Peter de Souza is an Assistant Professor at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies, Warwick University. His work explores how data is governed globally in contested, and plural settings. He is also the founder at Justice Adda.
• Dr. Siddharth Narrain is an Assistant Professor of Law at the National Law School of India University, whose work focusses on public law, law and media, human rights law, and gender and sexuality related law. Siddharth’s Ph.D. thesis titled Facebook’s Crowds and Publics: Law, Virality & the Regulation of Hate Speech Online in Contemporary India (UNSW, Sydney 2023) investigates how virality has enabled digital harms including hate speech online that has led to serious challenges to platform governance in the Indian context.

The National Human Rights Commission Chair on Human Rights, NLSIU in collaboration with Pacta, a Bengaluru-based law firm, organised a panel discussion on ‘Access to Justice’ based on a recently released report, on Wednesday, November 26, 2025.

The Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016 (RPwD Act) guarantees access to justice for persons with disabilities. Pacta’s ‘Access to Justice for Persons with Disabilities: A Data-informed Report’ examines how well that guarantee has translated into improved access across four critical pillars of the Indian Justice System: Police, Prisons, Judiciary and Legal Aid. The report primarily focusses on the lack of data across the system, which invisibilises the struggles (such as inaccessible infrastructure, lack of sensitivity within institutions, disparate mandates at various levels, and non-uniform practices across States) faced by persons with disabilities. This leads to a gap in awareness at an institutional level, making it challenging to take corrective measures.

This panel discussion began by sharing some of the major findings from the report. This includes a brief overview of the mandates for inclusion and data collection across the four pillars, the availability of data based on specific indicators and sub-indicators, some of the major issues that have been identified and recommendations to mitigate them. The discussion then turned to the diverse group of panellists, to seek their views on the inaccessibility plaguing our justice system, the utility of data-availability to tackle systemic challenges and analyse potential solutions to improve access to justice for persons with disabilities.

Panellists

Dr. Viswesh Sekhar, a senior advocate specialising in disability law. He has a Ph.D. from Symbiosis International University, on “Reasonable Accommodation and Accessibility as Human Rights of the Physically Disabled Person in India”. Dr. Sekhar has contributed to key reports and legal reforms, including the “Finding Sizes for All: A Report on the Status of the Right to Accessibility in India” report of the CDS Centre NALSAR, commissioned by the Supreme Court and quoted in the landmark Rajive Rathuri judgment. He was the only lawyer in the 16-member team of NGO representatives from India who attended the CRPD Committee at the United Nations, Geneva in 2019.

 

Mr. Shreehari Paliath, India Justice Report. Formerly, as a journalist, he has reported on social justice issues including labour, migration and criminal justice, and public policy, using public data. He won the Laadli Media & Advertising Awards for Gender Sensitivity in 2023 and 2025, and is a recipient of MSF’s Without Borders Media Fellowship.

 

 

Ms. Darshana Mitra, Assistant Professor of Law and Director-Clinics at NLSIU. Darshana has previously taught at the West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences (WBNUJS), Kolkata, and has worked as a researcher at the Alternative Law Forum, Bangalore. She is also the co-founder and director of Parichay, a collaborative legal aid clinic that works on citizenship deprivation and statelessness in Assam. At Columbia, she was a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar and a recipient of the Human Rights Fellowship, the Fulbright-Nehru Master’s Fellowship, and the 2019 Human Rights Institute Commendation for Leadership and Commitment in Human Rights. Her interests lie in citizenship and immigration law, human rights law, gender, child rights, and clinical legal education.

 

Ms. Varsha Aithala, Assistant Professor of Law and a doctoral candidate at NLSIU. She has worked as a corporate lawyer in leading Indian law firms and has significant corporate practice experience in India and the United Kingdom. Previously, she was a research fellow and faculty at the School of Policy and Governance, Azim Premji University. Her teaching and research interests cover the areas of access to justice, law and technology, private law and social investment. Varsha is qualified as a solicitor in England and Wales and as an advocate in India. Her doctoral work focuses on legal aid and courts in India.

 

Mr. Mohammad Abdurazak, a first-year LLB (Hons.) student at NLSIU who holds a BA in English from St. Joseph’s University, Bangalore. A para-athlete who has represented Karnataka at the National Paralympics in swimming, he has also written on disability and allied subjects, with publications in the Museum of Art and Photography and other outlets. His research interests include disability praxis and critical disability studies.

The Green Room presents a reading of Mahasweta Devi’s Draupadi on November 26, 2025 (5 pm–7 pm) at NAB 101.

Draupadi (originally Dopdi, translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak) is among her most iconic works. Reimagining the mythic figure of Draupadi within the harsh landscape of counterinsurgency operations in contemporary India, the story turns the epic heroine into a revolutionary tribal woman at war with state power.

Author and the Text:

Mahasweta Devi (1926-2016) was one of India’s most powerful and influential literary voices — a writer whose work (foundational in subaltern and feminist literature) consistently cut through layers of state violence, gendered oppression, and the lived realities of marginalised communities, especially Adivasi groups. Her stories are unsparing, political, deeply humane, and often unsettling in the questions they force us to confront.

Since this text is not a script, we’ll be gathering for an open discussion on its narrative, themes, and questions. Everyone is welcome to attend, even if you don’t get a chance to read the story beforehand.

 

 

We invite curious, interested and aspiring students, lawyers and other professionals to the open house on NLSIU’s Master’s Programme in Public Policy. This conversation will revolve around public policy education and practice, focussing on the curriculum and pedagogy of what NLS has to offer in this subject. This discussion will be hosted at the Lecture Room 1, India International Centre, New Delhi from 10:30 am to 12:30 pm on December 7, 2025.

The open house will be conducted by the Chair and Vice-Chair of the Public Policy programme at NLS – Dr. Srikrishna Ayyangar and Dr. Devyani Pande. Having a combined experience of around three decades of experience in this field both in India and abroad, they will convey the distinctive approach that NLS has to offer in Public Policy education.

Context

Over the past two decades, Public Policy has fundamentally changed the landscape of governance in India. With more than 60 academic programmes and a multi-billion dollars public policy industry in India today, professionals to work in the area of Public Policy are certainly in demand and on the rise. These jobs range from strategic advisory, policy analysis, evaluation and monitoring of government programmes and advocating for issues in the public interest such as climate and environment advocacy, energy sufficiency, gender and human rights, and community empowerment. Be that as it may, different public policy professional programmes offer a distinct approach to educating aspiring professionals to meet the needs of this profession.

The Masters Programme in Public Policy (MPP) at the National School of India University (NLS) offers one such distinctive approach. Being one of the first to launch a full-time programme in India and having faculty with diverse experience with global and local academic backgrounds from a variety of disciplines and including some of the founding faculty and students of NLS, the MPP has adapted and is at the
forefront of Public Policy education today.

The Master’s Programme in Public Policy (MPP) provides a comprehensive education for aspiring Public Policy professionals to constructively meet the challenges of complex public problems. Our programme comprises relevant and contemporary perspectives from the Social Sciences, multi-methods research, experiential and immersive field projects and internships. Additionally, how governments function cannot be fully understood by only looking only at data-based evidence and socio-political contexts. Data helps to evaluate how governments act because data reflects government action. And laws help to assess how governments think. Public Policy requires understanding administrative procedures, constitutional norms and a case-based understanding of how governments think and act. This programme is distinctive because it is singularly poised to also provide an exemplary foundation in the law relevant to Public Policy.

To register for the event, please click here.

A PDF version for circulation is also available here.

In this week’s faculty seminar Manish, Assistant Professor of Law, NLSIU presented his paper titled ‘Persistence of the world-class city: good governance and slum rehabilitation in contemporary Delhi’. The discussant was Dr. Sushmita Pati, Associate Professor of Social Science, NLSIU.

Abstract

This essay analyses contemporary slum rehabilitation policy in Delhi, India’s capital city—comprising the Delhi Slum and JJ Resettlement and Rehabilitation Policy 2015 and its enabling statute, the Delhi Urban Shelter Improvement Board Act 2010—using the framework of urban international law. It seeks to examine the policy framing of ‘slums’ as a problem needing the solution of ‘rehabilitation,’ and interrogate its assumptions and representations. In doing so, it shows that urban international law influences this framing through the logics of ‘good governance’ and the ‘world-class city’, and that in reproducing these logics the policy perpetuates existing inequalities experienced by the urban poor in Delhi.

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NLSIU launches a new conversation series by eminent speakers titled ‘Crafting Careers’ this week.  The inaugural session in this series features Mr. Vikram Bhat, Director of the Bangalore International Centre on November 22, 2025, from 2 pm to 3 pm at the NLS campus.

Crafting Careers

Crafting Careers is a new conversation series at the University under the NLS BA (Hons) programme, designed to help students navigate the world of work. Each session in the series brings leading professionals from fields such as media, government, public policy, business, finance, and the creative arts to campus for candid conversations about their journeys. These experts will share insights and advice from their professional experiences and offer reflections on how social science majors may relate to different career pathways. These dialogues will offer students a chance to learn from diverse experiences, gain practical insights, and reflect on how to build careers that align with their own interests, skills, and values.

About the Speaker

Vikram Bhat, presently the Director of the Bangalore International Centre, is a passionate educator who has had previous successful careers in technology and finance. In education, his areas of interest are educational equity, designing curricula for lifelong learning, and teacher training. He is particularly inspired by the potential of design thinking and an integrated Arts curriculum to transform educational systems.

Previously, Vikram worked as an advisor in the Deputy CM’s office in Delhi where he was a key member of the education task force which has transformed Delhi’s government schools. Before this, he served as the Vice Principal of an affordable private school in Central Bengaluru, prior to which he taught full-time at Parikrma, a unique NGO in Bengaluru that strives to provide high-quality education to slum children. He also held senior management positions at Dream a Dream & Teach For India, two of India’s most respected non-profits working in the education sector.

Prior to his career in education, he was the Vice-President of portfolio trading at Sanford Bernstein & Co., a pioneering equity research firm in New York, playing a key role in setting up their New York and London electronic trading operations.

He holds a B.E. in Electronics Engineering from the University of Mumbai, a Masters in Computer Science from New York University, and more recently, a Bachelor of Education from Christ University. He has also attended short-term courses at the d.school at Stanford University and Project Zero at Harvard University.

Vikram’s younger self is an avid long-distance runner having completed over 25 races and is a passionate film and theatre buff.

The National Law School of India University (NLSIU), Bengaluru, and the Rajiv K. Luthra Foundation (RKLF) are jointly organising the First Rajiv K. Luthra Memorial Lecture. This inaugural lecture will be delivered by Professor Dev Gangjee, University of Oxford, on the topic ‘Tools or Partners? Hybrid Human-AI Creativity and the Boundaries of Copyright’ on November 29, 2025.

If you are attending the event, kindly RSVP here.

Abstract of the Lecture

While policymakers and courts around the world grapple with the legality of training Generative AI on copyrighted works, an equally important question remains largely unexplored: can the human-induced outputs of these Gen AI systems ever qualify as authorial works under copyright law? If we use prompts to create images, can we claim them as our property? Do detailed and iterative prompts reflect sufficient human creative direction to qualify for copyright? Or are we simply rolling the dice each time, unsure of the results onscreen? As a normative matter, should we embrace this form of democratised creativity, which allows anyone to produce art, literature or music? Or does it fundamentally erode the relational processes which underpin meaningful creative production, thereby diluting markets for creative works? Generative AI therefore holds up a mirror to copyright law. This lecture reviews why we value creativity and through comparative law, including the US, EU, UK, China and India, explores whether copyright law has appropriate legal tools and thresholds in place to meet this challenge.

About The Speaker

Dev Gangjee is Professor of Intellectual Property Law within the Law Faculty and a Law Fellow at St Hilda’s College, University of Oxford. Prior to joining Oxford, he was a senior lecturer at the London School of Economics (LSE). Dev is a graduate of the National Law School of India University (NLSIU), Bengaluru and Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar.

About The Discussant

Eashan Ghosh is an advocate specialising in intellectual property law, in private practice since 2011. He is In-Charge IPR Chair at National Law University (NLU) Delhi, where he also serves as the Programme Director of the WIPO Joint Masters in Intellectual Property Law & Management. Eashan, a graduate of the NLSIU (BA LLB (Hons), 2010) is the author of three book titles, the most recent of them being Imperfect Recollections: The Indian Supreme Court on Trade Mark Law (2024).

About the Sponsors

NLSIU is hosting the First Rajiv K. Luthra Memorial Lecture with the support provided by the Rajiv K. Luthra Foundation (RKLF) that is based in New Delhi. The RKLF has been established in the memory of Late Shri Rajiv K. Luthra, the Founder and Managing Partner of Luthra & Luthra Law Offices, which is one of India’s most well-known commercial law firms. The RKLF has also provided a generous grant to NLSIU for the redevelopment of one of its academic buildings. This inaugural lecture is being organised as part of an annual lecture series.

The JSW Centre for the Future of Law at NLSIU is organising an online discussion with Madhavi Singh, Deputy Director of the Thurman Arnold Project and a Resident Fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School on November 24, 2025 (6 pm). The discussion will revolve around the topic, ‘Competition Issues around Google’s AI Answers in Search’.

Ms. Singh will be discussing a forthcoming paper which examines the competition risks arising from the integration of AI features in Google’s search, and the potential leveraging of dominance in search to monopolise adjacent markets such as answer engines.

Dr. Vikas Kathuria, Director of Centre on Law, Regulation & Technology (CLRT) at BML Munjal University, will be the discussant.

This discussion is part of the Centre’s series of presentations by leading scholars on novel scholarship and ongoing work.

About the Speaker

Madhavi Singh is the Deputy Director of the Thurman Arnold Project and a Resident Fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale. Her research looks at antitrust regulation of digital markets, the economic and non-economic effects of monopoly power, and consolidation in the AI supply chain.

Her professional expertise lies in antitrust, encompassing enforcement cases, corporate regulations and economic policy frameworks. Madhavi read for the Bachelor of Civil Law (B.C.L.) from the University of Oxford as a Felix Scholar and received an LL.M. from Harvard Law School as a K.C. Mahindra Scholar.

Registration

Registration for the event is mandatory. To register for the event, fill out the form here.
Registrants will receive details for the webinar link to to activate the MS Teams webinar.

 

 

 

At this week’s faculty seminar, Mahima Balaji and Kaustav Saha, Assistant Professors of Law, NLSIU, presented their paper titled, ‘Codified but Not Constrained: Recasting Proprietary Estoppel under the Indian Transfer of Property Act, 1882.’

Abstract

This article revisits the foundations of proprietary estoppel under the Indian Transfer of Property Act, 1882 (TPA), by examining Sections 41, 43, and 53A. It argues that the prevailing interpretation of these codified forms remains unduly tethered to contract law.

The article advances two core claims. First, it distinguishes between contractual invalidity – where an agreement is void under the Indian Contract Act, 1872 (ICA); and proprietary invalidity – where the interest itself is incapable of transfer under the TPA. Preserving this distinction, it is argued, is essential to maintaining the doctrinal coherence and function of proprietary estoppel in Indian property law. Second, the article reconceptualises proprietary estoppel under the TPA as generating substantive secondary rights, independent of contractual enforceability. Taken together, these claims position proprietary estoppel not as a contractual adjunct but as a distinct mechanism for the creation of proprietary interests within Indian law.

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