NLSIU will be conducting a Live Information Session for prospective candidates of the NLS BA (Hons) on ‘Preparing for the NLSAT-BA’ examination. The live information session will be conducted on Saturday, March 1, 2025, from 6 PM to 7 PM IST.
This online session will provide information on preparing for the National Law School Admissions Test (NLSAT – BA) and the examination pattern. Faculty will also discuss sample questions during the session.
NLSIU is hosting a Campus Visit Day for prospective candidates of the NLSAT-LLB and NLSAT-MPP on Saturday, March 8, 2025. This event is open to anyone interested in applying for the 3-Year LLB (Hons) and Master’s Programme in Public Policy programmes for the academic year 2025-26. It offers a unique opportunity to:
Attend demo classes conducted by NLSIU faculty.
Interact with members of the NLS community and gain insights into university life.
Explore the NLSIU campus through a guided campus tour.
Up to two guests are welcome to accompany applicants. Registration for the campus visit is mandatory. The schedule for the campus visit will be shared with registered attendees before the event.
Login to the application portal nlsatadmissions.nls.ac.into access the campus visit form and register!
📅 Deadline for registration: March 4, 2025 (11:59 pm)
NLSIU will be conducting four live information sessions on the new NLS BA (Hons.), the 3-Year LL.B. (Hons.) and the Master’s Programme in Public Policy (MPP)on February 14 and 15, 2025. These online sessions will provide information about the university, the structure of the respective programmes and the application process.
Feb 15, 2025 | 6 PM – 7 PM IST Speakers: 1. Dr. Betsy Rajasingh, LL.B. (Hons) Chair and Assistant Professor of Law, NLSIU
2. Dr. Rahul Hemrajani, LL.B. (Hons) Vice-Chair and Assistant Professor of Law, NLSIU Webinar Link
Session on the MPP Programme
Feb 14, 2025 | 6 PM – 7 PM IST Speakers:
1. Dr. Sneha Thapliyal, MPP Chair and Associate Professor, Economics, NLSIU
2. Dr. Devyani Pande, Assistant Professor, Public Policy. NLSIU Webinar Link
To apply for these programmes, visit nlsatadmissions.nls.ac.in. For further queries about the programmes, write to .
NLSIU will be conducting an information session on the 3-Year LL.B. (Hons.) Programme on Saturday, February 15, 2025, from 4:00 PM – 5:00 PM IST. This online information session will provide information about the university, the structure of the LL.B. (Hons.) programme and the application process.
Panel of speakers:
Dr. Betsy Rajasingh, LLB (Hons) Chair and Assistant Professor of Law, NLSIU
Dr. Rahul Hemrajani, LLB (Hons) Vice-Chair and Assistant Professor of Law, NLSIU
This information session is free and open to all candidates interested in the programme.
To register for the online information session, click here.
If you are planning to appear for the NLSAT – LLB, don’t forget to complete your registration (and payment) before March 23, 2025.
Guest speaker Dr. Natalie Sedacca of Durham University will present the fifth chapter of her book project at the faculty seminar on January 22, 2025, at the Ground Floor Conference Hall at NLSIU’s Training Centre.
Abstract
A central construction in the devaluation of domestic work is the presentation of paid domestic workers as akin to members of their employer’s family, which is highly gendered and masks deeply unequal relationships, overlapping with marginalisation based on factors like race / ethnicity, caste, migration status and class. This devaluation is manifested through legal frameworks excluding domestic workers from protections applicable to other sectors, including on minimum wages. This chapter examines devaluation and its manifestations in light of doctrinal and empirical material from four countries: Chile, the UK, South Africa, and India. It argues that while the familial discourse is complex and some workers may identify with it, its overall impact is to perpetuate devaluation, for example, in minimising workers’ demands for improvements and extracting additional work from them. It also examines how a lack of recognition of skills and complexity contribute to devaluation and discusses social reproduction theory as a route towards better valuation of domestic work.
The chapter assesses the extent of domestic workers’ exclusion from rights to minimum wage or key social security provisions applicable in other sectors, arguing that better regulation of these areas to include domestic work generally works against devaluation. Drawing on the case study material, it identifies three broad trends: the relatively strong regulatory framework with countervailing factors maintaining devaluation in Chile and South Africa; the familial discourse and relations of servitude in India; and devaluation based on an exemption from minimum wage that existed for some live-in domestic workers until recently in the UK. The final section explores the role and potential of human rights law in counteracting devaluation, including through recognition of the value of domestic work in findings of forced labour where pay has been denied, and challenges to exclusionary frameworks using indirect discrimination. Beyond equalisation with existing frameworks, I examine the arguably stronger right to a living wage and to fair pay, which is derived from social rights instruments, arguing for an approach to these rights that properly accounts for the value of feminised domestic work.
About the Speaker
Dr. Natalie Sedacca is an Assistant Professor in Employment Law at Durham University.
Her research focuses on human rights and labour law, with a particular interest in domestic workers and other marginalised workers, and in issues of gender and migration. Her PhD, completed at UCL in 2021, analysed the legal position of domestic workers and their frequent exclusion from protective labour law legislation in relation to two case studies, Chile and the UK, and criticised this from a human rights perspective. Natalie is now working on a book project arising from the PhD, which also includes case studies of South Africa and India.
Natalie has been a co-investigator on a funded project conducted as an equal partnership between NGOs and academics about the effects of conditions for agricultural and care work visas in the UK on workers’ vulnerabilities to trafficking and other forms of modern-day slavery. Natalie’s other research projects include: the human rights implications of the ‘hostile environment’ for migrant women; the rights of domestic and childcare workers in the ‘gig economy;’ and addressing violence and harassment at work.
Natalie is on the Research Committee for the Society of Legal Scholars and was previously the joint convenor for its Labour Law section from 2021 – 24. Natalie is a trustee for the migrant domestic worker NGO Kalayaan and is on the Executive Committee of Lawyers for Palestinian Human Rights.
Before entering academia, Natalie was a solicitor specialising in claims against the police and public authorities. She practised in this area for seven years post-qualification.
Reflections from the Speaker
“I am delighted to be visiting NSLIU, Bengaluru for the first time, and am very grateful to Dr. Saurabh Bhattacharjee and the Centre of Labour Studies for hosting me. I am currently working on a book project on the rights of domestic workers and the relevance of human rights law to challenging a lack of protection, which includes India as one of its case studies. I was introduced to NSLIU following a visit by my Durham colleague Dr. Clara Martins-Pereira and was particularly drawn to the Centre for Labour Studies, whose work overlaps in with my research interests on various topics such as informal work, precarious employment and forced labour. Since arriving at NSLIU, it has been very illuminating for me to meet with Centre members and hear more about their projects, which I hope will lead to future research collaborations.
In the Faculty Seminar on 22 January 2025, kindly organised by Ammel Sharon, I presented a draft of chapter five of my book project, entitled ‘The Devaluation of Domestic Work: Regulatory Reform and Challenges to the Perception of a ‘Family-Like’ Relationship.’ This chapter examines the ways in which a presentation of paid domestic workers as akin to members of their employer’s family devalues domestic work, overlapping with factors such as race, migration status and class. I examine how these discourses of devaluation overlap with regulatory regimes drawing on doctrinal and empirical material from four countries: Chile, the UK, South Africa, and India. The chapter also explores the role and potential of human rights law in counteracting devaluation and challenging exclusionary frameworks.
It was extremely helpful to receive feedback on my draft from legal academics and social scientists at NSLIU, ranging from technical comments on Indian law to conceptual questions on defining work and its value.”
The Queer Archive for Memory, Reflection, and Activism (QAMRA) Archival Project is organising an Open Day for the NLS Community on January 15, 2025, with an aim to engage with and reflect on the histories and lives of queer movements in India. Come by to look at archival materials on display, learn about QAMRA’s archival collections and the histories of queer activism and legal struggles in India.
About the Open Day
The Open Day will open with a short introduction to the archive, which will be hosted from 11 am to 11:30 am. The NLS Community is encouraged to come and interact with archival material and video footage between 11 am and 5 pm.
About QAMRA
The Queer Archive for Memory, Reflection, and Activism (QAMRA) chronicles the lives, reflections and memories of queer persons in India. It holds interconnected collections of individuals and organizations, whose work has had a demonstrable impact on Indian society and law, making it an archive of national and international significance.
Reflections from the QAMRA team
The Open Day hosted by QAMRA was met with a warm and thoughtful response from visitors, both from NLS and from beyond its community. It began by giving the guests an overview of QAMRA’s work as an archive, providing an overview of the display selection. The team spotlighted a variety of material, ranging from legal documents and personal interviews from the movement against Sec. 377, books and booklets with historical significance to queer life and activism, postcards celebrating queer joy and expression, and video clips from the queer movement over the years. The display also showcased photos and objects from the first and subsequent Bangalore Pride marches. A student-made chart from an elective course previously delivered by QAMRA was also on display, highlighting the archive’s engagement with the student body.
Visitors keenly and thoughtfully engaged with the material, expressing interest in wanting to visit again and spend more time closely looking at the archive’s holdings. As QAMRA, we look forward to further engagement with the NLS community.
The QAMRA Archive is located in the New Academic Block-113 (Ground Floor), and is open to visitors on Thursdays and Fridays (2:00pm – 5:30pm).
In this week’s faculty seminar, Noor Ameena, Assistant Professor of Law at NLSIU will be presenting on “Muslim Law and Legal Pluralism: Intersections of State and Community in Matrimonial Dispute Resolution among Muslims in Kerala.”
Abstract
Even though Muslim Personal Law occupies a disproportionate space in the Indian public sphere, the diversity of personal law practices is seldom explored. In this thesis, I intend to provide a field view of Muslim Personal Law through Family Courts, Mahal Committees and Qazi Offices. The study is set in Kerala. The study brings out the evolving jurisprudence of Muslim Personal Law through Family Courts. Within the framework of legal pluralism, the study examines the interaction between state and community systems of matrimonial dispute resolution, and how the rights and entitlements of the parties are mediated through these forums. It also studies how individuals, as well as the community, respond to the incursions by the state into their personal law. The study finds that the state and community systems of dispute resolution constantly collaborate with one another. The individuals engage with these systems by strategic inter-use to derive the desired results. There is a systemic and strategic integration of state and community systems. There is a constant process of secularization in this domain, however when this happens, the community is ‘holding on to religion’ in terms of substantive law, and ‘ceding to state’ in procedural law. In response to the incursions of state, the community law and systems are re-adjusting themselves into the boundaries set by the state, without completely losing their identity.
NLSIU will be conducting an information session on the NLS B.A. (Hons.) Programme on Friday, January 10, 2025, from 6:00 PM – 7:00 PM IST. This online information session will provide information about the university, the structure of the B.A. (Hons.) Programme and the application process.
The new BA (Hons.) is a 3-year programme with the option of an additional 4th year, being offered in the upcoming Academic Year 2025-26! The NLS BA is uniquely designed to include: Common Core Foundational Courses, Majors and Minors, Open Electives, Languages, Practice Courses and Internships.
Admission will be on the basis of an all-India National Law School Admission Test (NLSAT-BA).
Dr. Atreyee Majumder, BA (Hons) Committee Head and Associate Professor, Social Science, NLSIU
This information session is free and open to all candidates who have registered an interest in the programme. To register for the online information session, click here.
If you are planning to appear for the NLSAT – BA, don’t forget to complete your registration (and payment) at nlsatadmissions.nls.ac.in before March 23, 2025.
The National Law School of India University, Bengaluru, along with the Infosys Science Foundation is organising a talk on January 9, 2025 by Prof. Helen Nissenbaum from Cornell Tech, New York, on the topic “Contextual Integrity: Privacy as Data Governance.” The talk will be delivered on the NLSIU campus at 5 pm.
About the Speaker
Helen Nissenbaum is the Andrew H. and Ann R. Tisch Professor of Information Science and the founding director of the Digital Life Initiative at Cornell Tech. Her research spans issues of bias, trust, security, autonomy, and accountability in digital systems, most notably, privacy as contextual integrity. Professor Nissenbaum’s publications include the books Obfuscation: A User’s Guide for Privacy and Protest, with Finn Brunton (MIT Press, 2015), Values at Play in Digital Games, with Mary Flanagan (MIT Press, 2014), and Privacy in Context: Technology, Policy, and the Integrity of Social Life (Stanford, 2010). These, along with numerous research articles, have been translated into seven languages, including Polish, Chinese, and Portuguese. She received the 2014 Barwise Prize from the American Philosophical Association and the IACAP Covey Award for computing, ethics, and philosophy. Professor Nissenbaum has also contributed to privacy-enhancing free software, such as TrackMeNot (designed to prevent the profiling of web search histories) and AdNauseam(designed to counter profiling based on ad clicks). She holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from Stanford University and a B.A. (Hons) in Philosophy and Mathematics from the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa.
Contextual Integrity (CI) is a different way of defining privacy – not as secrecy and not as control over personal information but as appropriate flow. It answers an urgent societal need for a definition that is meaningful, explains why privacy is ethically compelling, and points to how we may protect it through law, regulation, and technology. My talk will review key theoretical ideas behind contextual integrity, provide evidence of its empirical robustness, and explain why successful regulation of privacy needs to be accompanied by effective data governance, aimed at protecting legitimate societal institutions (“contexts”) and their associated ends and values.
About the Infosys Science Foundation
The Infosys Science Foundation, a not-for-profit trust, was set up in 2009 by Infosys and members of its Board, with the objective of encouraging, recognizing, and fostering world class scientific research connected to India. The Foundation furthers its objectives primarily through the Infosys Prize an annual award, to honor outstanding achievements of researchers and scientists in six categories – Economics, Engineering & Computer Science, Humanities & Social Sciences, Life Sciences, Mathematical Sciences, and Physical Sciences. The Foundation also partners with educational institutions around the world to host lectures featuring Infosys Prize laureates and jurors aiming to spark curiosity and inspire the next generation of scholars. The Foundation creates conversations around science and society, engaging with various sections of the community, through talks, initiatives, workshops and training.
Excerpts from the talk
On what should be the definition of privacy
“What kind of understanding do we have to have of privacy to concede that this definition was good enough? So here are some of the basic benchmarks. 1) this conception has to be faithful to common use and by that, I mean that whatever the definition of privacy we have, it has to more or less track the way people think about the meaning of privacy. And in my view, there are various definitions of privacy that you see in the technical arena that are very rigorous, but they don’t respond to this concern.
They are rigorous because if you just adopt a natural definition, sometimes with these definitions of complex concepts that take something like justice, people, fairness, there’s a lot of argument. There could be inconsistency. So you have to shave off some of the meanings that’s very rigorous. And importantly, it has to explain privacy’s ethical significance.
So if I say, you have intruded on my privacy, that’s an ethical statement. It means you’ve done something wrong and you need to stop. A definition of privacy that doesn’t give that falls short. And I offer privacy as contextual integrity.”
On ‘privacy’
“I wanted to introduce the first premise of contextual integrity so that if everybody had to vacate the room for some reason and there’s only one thing you remember, this is it: The right to privacy is a right to appropriate flow of information. So that’s the most important difference, which is to say – flow. Concentrate on that word for a second because what I want to emphasise right from the beginning is that some definitions of privacy would define privacy as a form of secrecy. So the more information somebody has about you, the less privacy you have. And I didn’t think that that actually tracked what people cared about. It wasn’t that they cared that any information flows, because the flow of information is absolutely fundamental to just about everything we do in society.
So a theory of privacy that calls for secrecy is not a theory that can hold up the requirement of an ethical definition. So we need flow, but what privacy wants is appropriate flow. Then you might say, of course, well, what is appropriate flow? And that’s really what the theory tries to do. So what are the basic building blocks of contextual integrity? 1) social contexts, 2) contextual informational norms, that’s another big part of the theory, and then 3) this concept of contextual ends, values, and purposes.”
On ‘contextual norms’
“The idea is that we live in societies. Our social lives are not in some undifferentiated social space, but rather we are in and out of different social spheres: health, education, family, politics, and so forth. These contexts are defined by goals and purposes and values. So if we’re sitting in this room, here’s another one of the aspects of context. It’s associated with certain functions or practices.
It’s governed by certain norms and rules, so I’m fulfilling people’s expectations. So far, you’re also fulfilling people’s expectations. There are many things. If I stood up on this desk and started singing, you might be surprised and that’s because there’s certain norms.
So that’s really important and I want it to stick in our heads. Among the contextual norms are norms and rules that govern information flow. Now, that too is a fundamental part of the theory. The contextual informational norms have five parameters. Three of them have to do with the actors. You have subject, sender, recipient, attributes, which is information type, and transmission principle, which is the condition under which the information flows from party to party.”
On ‘transmission principles’
“A transmission principle is the constraint on the flow as it passes from one actor to the other actor. So the most common one that most of us are familiar with is with consent. So if some information passes from one party to another party and it’s with consent of the data subject, that’s one transmission principle. But it’s not always the case.
Sometimes in a court of law, the judge requires the person giving evidence to provide information and in that case, that information is coerced. Or information can flow because someone buys it and sells it. So there are lots of different transmission principles, but the idea is that it governs the flow from one party to the other.
… Now, this was one of the most inspiring cases to me. It was in 2007 and when I was already working on privacy. There was a huge outcry about Google Maps Street View. People complained about different things. So in the US, people would say, oh, you showed me sunbathing in a bikini. And in Japan, they were really upset because it showed the outside front of their homes. And men were saying, oh, I’m going to get in trouble for coming out of the strip club and so forth.
And the Google engineers defended themselves. They said, public is public. We’re not doing anything different. Whatever you did was in public, and we captured that. And so what contextual integrity shows is that actually, there is a radical difference, and I’m sure, it’s obvious to everybody that you can pinpoint by showing that once you’re posting it online, you’ve changed the recipient and you’ve changed the transmission principle. Because when people see you in public, for the most part, you see them. So there’s a reciprocity in public that does not exist when you move this onto the web (online mediums).”
Dr. Sneha Thapliyal, Associate Professor of Economics, NLSIU, will be the discussant.
This event is open to the public and registration for members outside of the NLSIU community is mandatory to attend the event. To register, click here.
About the Book
The nations of the Global North are responding to the climate change emergency with emissions trading schemes and alternative sources of energy. Meanwhile, nations of the Global South, still emerging from historical exploitation under colonialism, face decisions about natural resource use that are, for traditional owners and inhabitants of resource-rich lands, often a matter of life or death. Environmental lawyer and legal scholar Arpitha Kodiveri has worked alongside many of India’s forest-dwelling communities and describes how they bear the cost of both rapacious mining development and increasing pressure for forest land to be set aside for environmental conservation. Despite these challenges, Kodiveri shows how the traditional owners and inhabitants of forest areas are driving creative solutions in forest law. Hope can be found here, in each community’s unique vision of co-governance, expressed in the language of care and repair. (Source: Melbourne University Press)
Arpitha Kodiveri is an environmental law and justice scholar and assistant professor of political science at Vassar College. Her work focuses on the role of climate litigation in redressing claims of loss and damage due to climate change. She has previously worked as an environmental lawyer supporting Adivasi and forest-dwelling communities in India. (Source: Melbourne University Press)
Guest speaker 
The Queer Archive for Memory, Reflection, and Activism (
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On what should be the definition of privacy
The NLSIU Library Committee is organising a book talk at the NLS Library by 
