In this week’s faculty seminar, Dr. Sudheesh R C, Assistant Professor, Social Science, presented on ‘Decolonial Dilemmas in Development Cooperation.’ The seminar was held on July 23, 2025, in the Ground Floor Conference Hall at NLSIU’s Training Centre.
Abstract
This article examines Triangular Cooperation, which is garnering popularity in the development sector and is purportedly devoid of the old hierarchies associated with international development. The article locates this emerging mode of cooperation in the context of discussions on decolonisation and turns attention to the need to update the registers used to critique international development. Through an analysis of an array of project documents and a reflexive account of the author’s experiences in the aid sector, it explores the subtle forms of power that play out when “pivotal,” “beneficiary” and “facilitating” partners enter a project. The article argues that such an enquiry helps nuance our examination of coloniality in contemporary times. The article thereby calls for renewed attention to Triangular Cooperation in critical development studies that is currently preoccupied with South-South Cooperation.
The JSW Centre for the Future of Law at NLSIU organised an interactive session on ‘AI in Law’ with Mr. Vasu Aggarwal (NLS BA LLB 2023), Co-Founder of Lucio AI, on July 23, 2025. The session covered current practices, opportunities and challenges for AI providers and legal adopters.
Abstract
Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate capabilities that could substantially impact legal operations. For this to come to fruition, there is a need to realise the capacity of lawyers to fully utilise these tools in regular legal tasks. The discussion brought together the two composite stakeholders in this scenario, the service creators and providers in the form of AI-based legal solutions, and the law firm context for which they are designed. The speakers explored the challenges, opportunities and contours of change that present themselves in the meeting of AI and legal practice.
Speaking to our students, Mr. Aggarwal said:
“It’s all about context. Knowing how and when to use AI, will give you better results. I strongly suggest that one way to be relevant today is to learn how to use AI. Associates in law firms who know how to use AI are irreplaceable in this market.”
About Lucio
Pranav Kumar, Founders’ Office, Lucio:
“Lucio is a horizontal AI platform that essentially has a suite of functions that are useful for lawyers in their day-to day-workflow. This involves transaction lawyers, dispute lawyers, and even other lawyers who do other kinds of work. This involves day-to-day functioning with an ‘assistant’ that we have, which helps you with everything that you need to do. You can input queries, you can get research responses, etc. We also have something called a ‘briefcase’ which allows you to input an unlimited number of documents and individually chat with each document. Then we have something called ‘chronologies’ that helps you build a chronology out of multitudes of documents that you have. These are functions that lawyers will need to do for every case. So this makes their workflow much simpler.
Now how it works in the back end is we have a bunch of agents – we have 15 right now and we’re scaling to about a 100 – which work in the background for specific legal tasks. For example, when you require a summarisation, it will pick out the agent which has been programmed to do the best summarisation possible by wrapping multiple AI models and multiple agentic workflows. So we have multiple agents to do multiple things which work on the back end and help a lawyer in their daily workflow to make their work simpler.”
NLSIU invites interested persons to offer Elective Courses at the University in the second trimester (November 3, 2025 to January 23, 2026) of the Academic Year 2025-26.
An elective course at NLSIU requires 40 hours of classroom engagement spread across 10 weeks and two office hours every week for consultation and discussion with students.
All classes of full-term elective courses shall be conducted in-person at the NLSIU campus in Bengaluru.
On request and availability, the University may support Visiting Faculty with an Academic Associate to assist with the delivery of the course.
Elective Courses vary in their focus and pedagogy. Three types of Elective Courses are common at NLSIU:
Taught Course (predominantly lecture/discussion-based, with an exam);
Research Course (focussed on review of primary and secondary research leading to a Term Paper);
Practice or Clinical Course (focussed on field work, simulation, drafting or litigation exercises taught and examined through the clinical methods).
All classes shall be held between 9 am and 7 pm on weekdays only. Most elective courses are usually scheduled between 2 pm and 7 pm.
The University will reimburse one economy-class airfare, to-and-fro from Bengaluru for domestic flights only. The University will make necessary arrangements for accommodation for individuals selected to teach electives after mutual discussion for an initial 10 days from the commencement of the Trimester only. The University will not be able to provide any reimbursement for international flights.
Individuals who are desirous of teaching elective courses at NLSIU must invariably possess a graduate and post-graduate degree in Law or the Social Sciences. Post-qualification experience of 3 years or more will be preferred. Alternatively, they may have at least 7-10 years of post-qualification experience in legal practice. Individuals who have published widely in their fields of expertise, shall be preferred.
To apply, kindly fill out the form here. The last date to submit the form has been extended to August 24, 2025.
Your proposal shall be reviewed by the Academic Review Committee (ARC) of the University. The course shall be finalised after registration of choices by students. Please note that a course is offered only if it meets: (1) the approval of the ARC, and (2) a minimum number of students, as required by the University’s Academic Regulations, subscribe for the course.
For any academic queries please contact Dr. Saurabh Bhattacharjee at . For any other queries, please contact Mr. Shailendra Pratap Singh at .
FAQs
Here are some FAQs that will help you gain a better understanding of the electives courses and the process for applying to teach these courses. To know more, please click here.
The Indian Journal of International Economic Law (IJIEL), published by the National Law School of India University, Bengaluru, under the patronage of the WTO Chair, is now accepting submissions for its upcoming Volume 16(2), which will focus on Developing Countries and the Future of Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS).
About the Theme
ISDS is a central mechanism in international economic law, empowering foreign investors to bring claims against sovereign States. Despite this, the perspectives of developing countries—who are most frequently the respondents—remain marginalized in mainstream academic and policy discourse.
This Special Issue aims to foreground the experiences and priorities of developing nations at a moment when the ISDS system is under increasing scrutiny. As of 2023, over 1,330 known ISDS cases have been filed globally, with nearly 62% involving developing-country respondents. Concerns have mounted over “regulatory chill,” where governments delay or dilute social and environmental reforms for fear of triggering high-value claims.
Against the backdrop of global reform efforts (such as UNCITRAL Working Group III), this issue invites contributions that critically examine the legal, economic, and institutional aspects of ISDS from the vantage point of developing countries.
Suggested Sub-Themes
We welcome submissions on topics including but not limited to:
Compensation in Investment Arbitration: Evolving standards and valuation controversies in ISDS damages (e.g., speculative future profits, disproportionate awards).
Beyond Investment Arbitration: Alternatives such as mediation, multilateral courts, or state-to-state resolution; analysis of their viability for developing countries.
ISDS and Climate Change: Investor challenges to environmental policies; treaty carve- outs; tensions between investment protection and sustainability.
Procedural and Interpretational Issues: Jurisdiction, bifurcation, cost allocation, transparency, and evolving doctrinal standards (e.g., fair and equitable treatment, expropriation).
Third Party Funding (TPF): Growing use of TPF in ISDS; implications for access to justice, fairness, and regulatory responses.
Comparative and interdisciplinary approaches are encouraged.
Submissions for the special issue may be made in accordance with our Submission Guidelines under any of the mentioned categories. For further clarity on the categories, please refer here.
Interested authors are requested to submit their manuscripts via our Digital Commons portal. Please refer to this guide for instructions and clarifications with respect to navigating Digital Commons.
The deadline for submissions is October 15, 2025.
Please note that we do not accept submissions over email.
NLSIU’s HUPA Chair on Urban Poor and the Law organised a book talk on ‘Experimental Times: Startup Capitalism and Feminist Futures in India‘ by Dr. Hemangini Gupta, Lecturer, Gender and Global Politics, Department of Politics, University of Edinburgh. The talk took place at the Training Centre at the NLS campus on July 25, 2025.
About the Book
Experimental Times: Startup Capitalism and Feminist Futures in India is an in-depth ethnography of the transformation of Bengaluru/Bangalore from a site of “backend” IT work to an aspirational global city of enterprise and innovation. In this talk, we journeyed alongside the migrant workers, technologists, and entrepreneurs who shape and survive the dreams of a “Startup India” knitted through office work, at networking meetings and urban festivals, and across sites of leisure in the city. Tracking techno-futures that involve automation and impending precarity, the author will detail the everyday forms of experimentation, care, and friendship that sustain and reproduce life and labour in India’s current economy.
About the Speaker
Dr. Hemangini’s interests include feminist and queer theory; activism; postcolonial and decolonial theory; cities; labour; capital; technoscience; and racialisation. She has a PhD in Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies from Emory University, Atlanta, US. Her research and teaching interests include transnational feminisms, capitalist spaces and temporalities, and labour and technology in the South.
Her current research unfolds along two major strands:
One project is concerned with the transforming conditions of social reproduction under entrepreneurial and platform capitalism. Within this, she has also undertaken collaborative and multimodal ethnographic fieldwork with workers in entrepreneurial companies to innovate with new methods needed to understand work that is fragmented and dispersed across city spaces. Her research focusses on forms of difference within entrepreneurial economies to understand how historical structures of oppression shape access to finance, funding, and possibilities for labour mobility.
A second strand of research queries the ecological costs and entanglements of large scale data projects. Interrogating technological visions for environmental justice, she asks how we might trace the changes in land and water that accompany a move to “cloud” economies. Offering a grounded and historical context to imaginations and practices of ecological futures, this project situates technological future-making within the infrastructural and logistical architectures through which it is materialised.
Speaking to us, Hemangini said:
“My book ‘Experimental Times’ is about the remaking of Bangalore from a site of backend work to a city that is now celebrated by middle class entrepreneurs and state officials as a global ‘ecosystem’ for innovative startup work. I ask how this refashioning happens – and the question led to fieldwork at accelerator labs, Startup Festivals, and networking meetings but also to the workers who power this economy. I based myself at small and midsize entrepreneurial companies, working alongside a young and often migrant workforce, to understand how this new economy shapes life and labour.
I came to this research wanting to understand what changes in women’s lives with economic shifts – do they enjoy different forms of independence, freedom in the city, and more decisions in their personal and familial lives?”
THE WEEK-Hansa Research Survey 2025: India’s best colleges | June 2025
The Week Magazine ranked NLSIU, Bengaluru as thetop Law College in India in its 2025 rankings. THE WEEK-Hansa Research Best Colleges Survey 2025 covered 11 disciplines—arts, sciences, commerce, engineering, medicine, dentistry, law, hotel management, fashion technology, mass communication and architecture—across 22 cities.
Parameters: Infrastructure
Faculty
Teaching-learning process
Extracurriculars
Placement
The methodology is by India Today knowledge partner MDRA, and is designed and developed for ranking of institutions of higher education. According to India Today, “The rankings’ consistency over the years helps in comparing results with previous years. During the objective ranking of colleges, MDRA has carefully attuned 112+ attributes across each of the streams to provide the most comprehensive and balanced comparisons of colleges. These performance indicators were clubbed into 5 broad parameters.”
Parameters:
Intake Quality & Governance
Academic Excellence
Infrastructure & Living Experience
Personality & Leadership Development
Career Progression & Placement.
MDRA has evaluated colleges based on the latest data to give more realistic, updated and accurate information. The ranking tables also give parameter-wise scores to provide deeper insights into key aspects of decision-making by various stakeholders.
EducationWorld India Higher Education Rankings | April 2025
NLSIU was ranked #1 in India in the EducationWorld Rankings 2025 in the following categories:
India’s #1 Government Law and Humanities University in the EducationWorld India Higher Education Rankings for the fourth consecutive year – Read more
The Education World survey is conducted by the Delhi-based Centre for Research & Forecasting (C fore estb. 2000) – a market research and opinion poll company – which interviews faculty members and professionals across the country. The rankings are based on perception scores under six parameters of higher education excellence.
Parameters:
Infrastructure
Placements
Faculty competence
Curriculum & pedagogy (digital readiness)
Faculty welfare and development
Leadership.
Diya was nominated and selected to be a 2025-26 Whitney Humanities Centre Fellow in the Environmental Humanities — where she will receive a top-up stipend and join a select group of doctoral fellows from across disciplines, including Anthropology, English, Medieval Studies, and East Asian Languages and Literatures, who share interests in the Environmental Humanities.
Area of study
Diya proposes tracing a global history of the coal commodity frontier in Dhanbad, India’s coal capital, to examine the making of corporate power in modern South-Asia. She is interested in how coal emerges not just as an extractive resource but as a dynamic force, continually reshaping legal, social, and economic boundaries while extending the reach of extractive capitalism into new, often invisible, terrains of power. Through local and archival studies of the company town, railway lines and energy grids, she aims to study how capital works recursively across fossil fuel commodity frontiers in the Indian Ocean.
Closer to her previous work on the entanglements of corporations and the state within constitutional law, one of her central questions examines the historical relationship between law and capital in shaping modern corporate sovereignty. The corporation’s status as a ‘legal person’ grants it special, and foundational, legal immunities, which have been crucial to its ability to exercise sovereign powers. In her doctoral project, she is interested in examining the modes of legal immunity by which corporate sovereignty is sustained over both the colonial and postcolonial periods.
Speaking to us, Diya said, “My project lies at the intersection of histories of capitalism, law, and empire. By integrating my interest in environmental studies and science and technology studies (STS), this work extends existing scholarship on corporations, mining and labour into an interdisciplinary exploration of ecology, power, law, and the global networks that shape frontier landscapes and the lives of the actors who inhabit them.”
[Left to Right] Mr. Devesh Pandey [PhD Scholar]; Mr. Anubhav Bishen [PhD Scholar]; Dr. Devyani Pande [Assistant Professor, Public Policy]; Mr. Manish [Assistant Professor of Law]; Prof. (Dr.) Sony Pellissery, Professor & Co-Director, Centre for the Study of Social InclusionA delegation of faculty and students from NLSIU participated in the 7th International Conference on Public Policy (ICPP) held from July 1-4, 2025 in Chiang Mai, Thailand.
About the Conference
Organised by the International Public Policy Association every alternate year, ICPP is the largest public policy conference in the world. This edition of ICPP saw 1050 registered participants from 70 different countries.
The NLS Delegation
This year’s delegation is the largest from NLSIU to participate in any edition of ICPP till date. It included:
*Prof. (Dr.) Sony Pellissery, Professor & Co-Director, Centre for the Study of Social Inclusion
*Dr. Devyani Pande, Assistant Professor, Public Policy
*Mr. Manish, Assistant Professor of Law
*Mr. Anubhav Bishen, PhD Scholar
*Mr. Devesh Pandey, PhD Scholar
Contributions of the NLS Delegation
The NLS delegation participated in three panels, as chairs, discussants, and presenters. They also co-chaired a roundtable.
Panels
‘Constitutional Economics for Public Policy’ *Dr. Sony Pellissery chaired the panel.
*Manish and Anubhav Bishen presented a paper at this panel titled “Committed Judiciary and Transitioning Economic Regimes: Policy Challenges to Economic Democracy in India.”
‘Policy Transfer from the Global South’ *Dr. Pellissery was a discussant on the panel.
*In addition, he presented a paper titled “Divergent epistemologies for policy transfer: Comparative Examination of the disciplines of ‘Development Studies’ and ‘Public Policy’,” and was the discussant for the panel.
‘Regulating AI: Governance Challenges and Policy Implications’ *Dr. Devyani Pande co-chaired a session and was a discussant for one of the two sessions within the panel. In the first session, she also presented a co-authored research article on “Public preferences of measures to build trust in high-risk AI: Variations across Singapore, Seoul, and Tokyo” with Dr. Shaleen Khanal and Dr. Araz Taeihagh (National University of Singapore).
*Devesh Pandey and Anubhav Bishen also presented a paper at this panel, titled “The Right to have a ‘Right to Explanation’: A Global South Perspective.”
Roundtables
Dr. Pande was the co-chair for a roundtable on ‘Governing AI in the Global South: Balancing the Needs, Benefits, and Challenges’ at the conference.
We kicked off the new academic year’s faculty seminars with a presentation by Dr. Rahul Hemrajani, Assistant Professor of Law, NLSIU, on ‘A Ranking System for Indian Legal Journals.’ The seminar was held on July 9, 2025, in the Ground Floor Conference Hall at NLSIU’s Training Centre at 2:30 pm.
The co-authors include NLS students Tvisha Vasudevan [IVth year BA LLB], Shrishty Chhaparia [Vth year BA LBB] and Riddhi Puranik [IInd year LLB (Hons)].
Abstract
The Indian Legal Scholarship Indexing Project (ILSIP) is an initiative to create an empirical map of India’s legal‑research landscape, beginning with journal articles published in Indian law reviews. By documenting what kinds of work are published, who the authors are, and how those writings influence scholarship and legal practice, we aim to provide a clear, data‑driven picture of contemporary Indian legal research.
One of the first major outputs of this project —the Indian Law Journals Ranking System (ILJRS) — is an open and systematic ranking system tailored specifically for Indian law journals. Our ranking methodology employs a multi-factor approach, considering elements such as the credentials and affiliations of contributing authors, available citation metrics, and practices like transparent peer-review processes and editorial standards. The initial phase of this project has indexed and ranked 29 generalist law journals, including both faculty-edited and student-edited publications.
The National Law School of India University, Bengaluru, invites applications for a full-time role in the Academic Administration department for a period of one year (extendable). Candidates who have recently completed their graduation are encouraged to apply.
About NLSIU
NLSIU was established in 1987 to be a pioneer in legal education. Over the last three decades the university has consistently been an innovative leader in legal education and research in India and has been ranked first among law universities in the National Institute Ranking Framework for the last seven years.
Roles and Responsibilities
Supporting the administration of courses through course registration and setting up courses on LMS;
Student enrollment on ERP and LMS;
Creating timetables on ERP and managing the logistics of classes;
Scheduling and management of faculty office hours;
Updation of attendance and analysis;
Managing the logistics of the examination process;
Result tabulation and grade publishing;
Contributing to University-wide requirements for reporting data for different ranking work;
Query management & Helpdesk responsibilities;
Supporting convocation process.
Qualifications, Experience, and Skills
Essential Qualifications
Graduate degree in any discipline with aggregate 55% marks.
Desirable Qualifications
Post Graduate Degree in a related field.
Skills and Competencies
Excellent general skills with Microsoft Office Suite (Excel, Word, PowerPoint) and IT skills;
High analytical ability. Prior experience in data management and analysis is preferred;
Strong communication skills, both written and oral;
Excellent interpersonal skills, fostering teamwork and a collaborative work ethic;
Critical thinking and ability to suggest alternatives.
Compensation
Salary will be commensurate with qualification and experience and will be in the range of Rs. 40,000 – 50,000 per month
How to Apply?
Please use the Google form available here, and include the following documents:
An updated CV
A statement of purpose (not more than 500 words)
Details of two professional references. Please submit two faculty references if you are a fresher.
For any queries, please write to .
Deadline
The last date to submit your application is July 21, 2025 (5 PM).
The 
NLSIU’s 
Outlook-ICARE Rankings 2025: Top 13 Government Law Institutes | July 2025
THE WEEK-Hansa Research Survey 2025: India’s best colleges | June 2025
India Today Best Colleges | June 2025
NLS faculty ![[Left to Right] Mr. Devesh Pandey [PhD Scholar]; Mr. Anubhav Bishen [PhD Scholar]; Dr. Devyani Pande [Assistant Professor, Public Policy]; Mr. Manish [Assistant Professor of Law]; Prof. (Dr.) Sony Pellissery, Professor & Co-Director, Centre for the Study of Social Inclusion](https://www.nls.ac.in/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/ICPP7-scaled-e1752146871299-1024x935.jpeg)
We kicked off the new academic year’s faculty seminars with a presentation by