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

NLSIU recently launched a new conversation series by eminent speakers titled ‘Crafting Careers’.  our next session in this series features Ms. Astha Kapoor, Co-founder and Director, Aapti Institute
on January 7, 2026, from 5 pm to 6 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

Astha has over a decade of public policy and strategy consulting experience, with a focus on the use of technology for welfare. At Aapti, Astha leads the Data Economy Lab, a vertical established to research and test new methods of data sharing, data stewardship and governance. Her recent work is focused on participative governance of data, and its use for building collaborative AI, through collective governance methods such as cooperatives. She serves on the advisory boards of the Data Trust Initiative (Cambridge University) and Indian Urban Data Exchange (IUDEX). Prior to Aapti, Astha worked with Future State, Azim Premji’s Philanthropic Initiatives, Dalberg Global Development Advisors, the Planning Commission, the Government of India and the Self-Employed Women’s Association. She’s a visiting fellow at the Ostrom Workshop (Indiana University), a two-time TEDx speaker, and a Global Governance Futures Fellow 2018-19. Astha’s writing has been published in the Mint, Hindu, and Deccan Herald among others.

Related Video – Watch the Crafting Careers Session with Mr. Vikram Bhat, Director, BIC, here: 

The National Law School of India University (NLSIU) was delighted to host artist Pushpamala N and scholar Deeptha Achar on January 7, 2026 as part of our Public Lectures series.

About the Lecture

‘Looking at Karnataka’s First Modern Artist K. Venkatappa’ by Pushpamala N

In her illustrated discussion of K. Venkatappa (after whom the Venkatappa Art Gallery in Bengaluru is named), artist Pushpamala N framed him as a crucial regional modernist shaped by Mysore court patronage who deviated from the colonial aesthetic of oil painting and the Bengal School’s spiritualised art. Patronised by Krishnaraja Wodeyar IV in Mysore and trained at the Madras School of Art and Crafts, Venkatappa absorbed Western academic techniques and familiar with anti-materialist, pan-Asian aesthetic debates associated with a figure like Abanindranath Tagore under whom he studied. Pushpamala highlighted how his practice, seen in series such as the Ramayana illustrations, Mad after Veena, charcoal drawings, bas-reliefs, and later landscapes, privileged colour, wash, or sculptural solidity over the Bengal School’s ethereal line. His muscular, grounded bodies, use of industrial materials like plaster, and mythic-classical themes reflected both a working-class sensibility and Mysore’s distinctive modernity. Overall, Venkatappa emerges as a “lost ancestor” in Karnataka, an artist who forged a regional aesthetic modernism that negotiated courtly patronage, nationalism, and experimentation without replicating Calcutta’s cultural hierarchy.

‘National Art, Regional Modernity, and the Litigious Life of K. Venkatappa’ by Deeptha Achar

Deeptha Achar read K. Venkatappa’s litigious life as central to understanding both his contradictory personality and the nexus between law, art, and Indian modernity. Moving between Mysore, Calcutta, and Bangalore, Venkatappa repeatedly turned to law as a mode of self-fashioning and public engagement, even as he cultivated the persona of an unworldly, inward-looking artist. Achar argues that his court cases—including disputes with institutions like the Indian Oriental Society and the dramatic but ultimately unsuccessful suit against the Mysore king—were not merely personal grievances but assertions of artistic worth, property, and dignity by someone marked by artisanal caste origins within a hierarchical courtly order. His insistence on litigation, even when compromise was offered, dramatised the radical promise of legal equality under modern law, while also revealing its social and material costs. Through his diaries written in English over many decades, law appears as a lived social space in which Venkatappa negotiated being “an artist rather than an artisan,” exposing the tensions between caste, profession, nationalism, and the fragile democratisation promised by modern legal institutions.

About the Speakers

Pushpamala N

Pushpamala N has been called “the most entertaining artist-iconoclast of contemporary Indian art”. In her sharp and witty work as a photo- and video-performance artist, sculptor, writer, and curator, and in her collaborations with writers, theatre directors and filmmakers, she seeks to subvert the dominant discourse. She is known for her strong feminist work, informed by cultural theory, feminist studies and social science. Her work is shown worldwide and is in the collections of major museums like the Museum of Modern Art New York, Tate Modern London, Centre Charles Pompidou Paris, Art Gallery of New South Wales Sydney, NGMA and KNMA Delhi and MAP Bangalore. She created a fictional platform for discourse, ‘Somberikatte’ (Idler’s Platform) in 1996 through which she organises talks and conferences. To celebrate 20 years of Somberikatte, she organised an international conference of the early modern artist K Venkatappa in Bangalore in 2016. Based on the papers presented at this conference, her co-edited volume: Nation, Region, Modernity: The Art of K. Venkatappa has been published by Routledge ( 2025). She was the Artistic Director of the Chennai Photo Biennale , ‘Fauna Of Mirrors’ , for which she also organised an international conference on photography, Light Writing (2019). Recently she curated the print retrospective exhibition of Gulammohammed Sheikh: ‘Hand Prints/ Mind Prints’ and is now working on the book. She lives and works in Bangalore.

Deeptha Achar

Deeptha Achar has just retired as Professor, Department of English, Faculty of Arts, Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, Gujarat. Among the books she has co-edited are Towards New Art History: Studies in Indian Art (2003), and Articulating Resistance: Art and Activism (2012) apart from catalogue essays. Her most recent co-edited volume is Nation, Region, Modernity: The Art of K. Venkatappa (2025). She is the series editor of the Different Tales, a multilanguage series of illustrated children’s books that thematise marginalised childhoods. She has co-curated an archival show entitled Enlightenment from an Unlikely Envelope: Archives of Adil Jussawalla currently running at the Kerala Museum, Kochi. Her research interests include visual culture studies and childhood studies.

We were delighted to host Ambassador Ashok Sajjanhar, IFS (Retd), Former Ambassador of India to Kazakhstan, Sweden, and Latvia, at the NLS campus on January 6, 2026. Ambassador Sajjanhar delivered a talk as part of the ‘MEA Distinguished Lecture Series’ by the Ministry of External Affairs, Government of India.

His talk, titled ‘Evolution and the Future of the Indo–US Strategic Partnership: With Emphasis on Trade Policy and Geopolitics in the Indo-Pacific Region,’ was held at the NLSIU Conference Hall, Training Centre.

Ahead of the talk Ambassador Sajjanhar met with NLSIU Vice-Chancellor Prof. (Dr.) Sudhir Krishnaswamy; Registrar In-Charge Dr. Nigam Nuggehalli; Dean-Academics & Associate Professor of Law Dr. Saurabh Bhattacharjee; Assistant Professor of Social Science Dr. Debangana Chatterjee; Associate Professor of Law Dr. Harisankar K Sathyapalan; and Ms. Deepti Soni, Director, Communications and External Relations.

The programme commenced with inaugural remarks by Ms. Deepti Soni, introducing the speaker and the talk. Dr. Harisankar K Sathyapalan moderated the ensuing Q&A session, and Dr. Debangana Chatterjee concluded the event with the Vote of Thanks.

Abstract

Relations between India and USA have experienced many ups and downs since India’s independence 78 years ago. Relations sank to their nadir in 1971 and 1998. However, ties between the two countries witnessed a steady upward trend since 2000. Addressing the Joint Session of the US Congress in 2016, PM Narendra Modi declared that India ‘’has overcome the hesitations of history.’’ In 2022, speaking with the then US President Joe Biden, PM Modi stated that India-US partnership is based on ‘’trust.’’ This trust received a huge jolt in 2025 with the assumption of power by Donald Trump as the President of USA. This is evident not only in the area of trade in which US actions are totally violative of International Trade Rules as enshrined in the WTO but also in areas of political, security and strategic affairs. What is likely to be the future state of India-US relations? Can the mutual trust be restored or will the relations revert to the period of the Cold War?

About the Speaker

Ambassador Ashok Sajjanhar, IFS (Retd), was Former Ambassador of India to Kazakhstan, Sweden, and Latvia. He has also worked in senior diplomatic positions in Indian Embassies/Missions in Washington DC, Brussels, Moscow, Geneva, Tehran, Dhaka and Bangkok, and at Headquarters in India.

He negotiated for India in the Uruguay Round of Multilateral Trade Negotiations and in India-EU, India-ASEAN and India-Thailand Free Trade Agreements. He contributed significantly to strengthening strategic and economic ties and promoting cultural cooperation between India and USA, EU, Russia and other countries.

Ambassador Sajjanhar worked as Head of the National Foundation for Communal Harmony to promote amity and understanding between different religions, faiths and beliefs. He has been decorated by Governments of Kazakhstan and Latvia with their National Awards and by Universal Peace Federation, New York (a body in special, consultative status with the United Nations) with Title of “Ambassador of Peace.”

Presently he is the Executive Council Member, at the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses; President of the Institute of Global Studies; and a Distinguished Fellow at Ananta Aspen Centre.

He writes, travels and speaks extensively on issues relating to international relations, foreign policy and themes of contemporary relevance and significance.

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NLSIU’s Library Committee organised a Book Talk on ‘Copyright as Personal Property,’ authored by Dr. Poorna Mysoor and published by the Oxford University Press. The talk, held on January 9, 2026, saw Dr. Poorna Mysoor in conversation with NLSIU’s Prof. (Dr.) Arul George Scaria.

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 (French for “thing 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).

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

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.

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The National Law School of India University organised 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 invited 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.

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