We are pleased to welcome the following faculty members to the NLS community. Our new joinees include Ms. Faiza Rahman (Assistant Professor-Law), Ms. Mihika Poddar (Assistant Professor-Law) and Mr. John Sebastian (Assistant Professor-Law). We wish them the very best for their professional journeys at NLSIU.
Faculty
Ms Faiza Rahman
Assistant Professor – Law
Faiza Rahman’s teaching and research interests include constitutional law and theory, administrative and regulatory laws, and media and technology law and policy.
Prior to joining NLSIU, Faiza served as a teaching fellow in the free speech and media law course at Melbourne Law School. In India, she has worked for over six years across research, public policy and practice. She was a research fellow at the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy, New Delhi, where she worked on areas of technology law and regulatory governance. She has also worked as a research fellow with the public law and judicial reforms verticals at Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy, New Delhi. Before venturing into research and academia, Faiza worked as an associate in the capital markets practice at Luthra & Luthra Law Offices, Mumbai.
Faiza was awarded a full scholarship by the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies to pursue the BCL at the University of Oxford, United Kingdom.
Mr. John Sebastian
Assistant Professor – Law
John Sebastian’s general research and teaching interests cover the areas of legal and political theory, constitutional law, criminal law and administrative law. He has published on a range of issues in these areas.
His PhD research at Melbourne Law School, University of Melbourne, focusses on the special rights of linguistic and religious minorities in the Indian Constitution, and analyses the manner in which the Constitution engages with the many conflicting interests and values underlying the legal recognition of these identities.
Prior to joining NLSIU, John taught legal theory in the Juris Doctor programme at Melbourne Law School for three years. Before this, he was at OP Jindal University for over four years, where he taught constitutional law, criminal law and administrative law courses. Earlier, he worked as a law clerk and research assistant to Justice Madan B Lokur in the Supreme Court of India for a year. While doing his BCL from the University of Oxford, John was awarded the Tobias Law Prize.
Ms. Mihika Poddar
Assistant Professor – Law
Mihika’s research interests include, Human Rights Law and Policy, Discrimination Law, Queer and Feminist Legal Theory, Law and Society, Constitutional law, Criminal Law.
She is a DPhil candidate in law at the University of Oxford, where she is undertaking research on legal recognition of personal identities, including race, sex/gender and caste.
Mihika obtained the Bachelor of Civil Law (BCL) with Distinction on a Rhodes Scholarship. She is also a qualified lawyer and university medallist from the West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences (WBNUJS), India, where she completed her B.A. LL.B. (Hons.) in 2019.
She has been a tutor and lecturer in English Criminal Law and Feminist Perspectives in Law at the University of Oxford, University College London, and Catholic University of Lille, Paris.
Professor Sony’s intervention was focussed on how development doctrine evolved from conceptualising cities as vehicles of growth to cities as spaces to realise justice. The latter focus is what is called New Urbanism. In other words, New Urbanism recognises the failures of traditional city-focussed growth models. Urban Planning as a profession has to prioritise whether the exercise is to build cities for growth or to build cities of spatial justice. Traditionally, planning as an instrument borrowed colonial models and focused on making aesthetic cities (to attract capital), to make cities look modern (contrasted to traditional countryside), and functional differentiation (as business areas, residential areas and industrial locations) within city. These three functions primarily served the interests of markets. Within intensified markets exchanges through globalisation, cities across the world began to look alike. This led to loss of ecological character of cities. Ecological crisis is an invitation to restore the ecological character of cities.
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The 
