Dr. Arun K. Thiruvengadam

Education

• JSD (Doctorate in Law), School of Law, New York University – 2007.
• LL.M (Global Public Service Law), School of Law, New York University – 2002.
• LL.M (Public Law and Policy Choice), National Law School of India University, Bangalore – 2001
• B.A, LL.B (Hons), National Law School of India University, Bangalore – 1995

Profile

Dr Arun Thiruvengadam joined NLSIU in September 2021 as a Professor of Law.  His teaching and research interests lie in the areas of Constitutional and Administrative law in India; Comparative constitutional law; Law and Development; Law and Politics in South Asia; and Welfare Rights.   

Between 1995-97, he served as a Law-clerk-cum-research-assistant to the Chief Justice of India, Justice A.M. Ahmadi, at the Supreme Court of India. He practiced law for approximately two years before the High Courts of Madras and Delhi and the Supreme Court of India, before commencing graduate studies in 1999. 

Arun is a founding editor (and currently the co-General Editor) of the Indian Law Review (Taylor and Francis, UK).  He also serves as an editor with the Asian Journal of Comparative Law (Cambridge UK) and World Comparative Law (Nomos, Germany).  

Teaching Experience

Arun has held research and teaching assistant positions at the National Law School (1999-2001) and New York University School of Law (2003-05). He was successively a Visiting Fellow (2005-07) and an Assistant Professor of Law (2007-15) at the Faculty of Law, National University of Singapore. In 2015, he joined the School of Policy and Governance at Azim Premji University, Bangalore where he worked for six years (Associate Professor, 2015-2017; Professor 2017-21).  

He has taught courses, in a visiting capacity, at the following institutions: Sai University, Chennai, University of Zurich, Switzerland, Central European University, Budapest/Vienna, School of Law, City University of Hong Kong, University of Trento, Italy, and the WB National University of Juridical Sciences, Kolkata.  In November 2019, he was appointed the James Merralls Fellow at the University of Melbourne Faculty of Law, as part of which he delivered two public lectures in Melbourne and Sydney.  He has previously taught as a Distinguished Faculty at the Faculty of Law, University of Toronto, Canada.  

Research

Arun has benefited greatly from collaborative research projects and continues to be part of some projects that involve scholars, practitioners and researchers from within India and across the globe. Details of his projects are available in his CV linked here. 

His main areas of research interest are: Indian constitutional and administrative law, Comparative constitutional theory and law, Law and Development, Law and Politics in South Asia, Legal theory, History and practice of legal education.

Arun is willing to supervise Master’s and Doctoral students in his areas of research, and would welcome such requests for supervision from graduate students.  

Publications

A full listing of Arun’s publications is available in his CV linked above.  Some of his recent publications are: 

Books:

The Constitution of India: A contextual analysis (Hart Publishing/Bloomsbury UK/Bloomsbury India: Dec 2017; Indian edition, January 2018), pp. 240.  

Edited books: 

Democratic Constitutionalism in India and the European Union: Comparing the law of democracy in continental polities (Edward Elgar: Feb 2021) (with Philipp Dann), pp. 302

Amartya Sen and Law (Routledge USA: 2019) (with Carrie Menkel-Meadow, Victor Ramraj and Supriya Routh), pp. 416.  

Journal Articles:

Teaching Law and Development in India: Reflections, Insights and Challenges, Vol. 55 (2), VRU/WORLD COMPARATIVE LAW (2022), pp. 147-169. (with Neeraj Grover), 22 pp.

Fortifying Liberal Constitutionalism in our Times: Reflections on ‘Abusive Constitutional Borrowings’, Vol 12 (2) Journal of Indian Law and Society (Winter 2021), pp. 116-124.   

Book Review, Justice vs Judiciary (2019) by Sudhanshu Ranjan, Vol, 17 (2) 2021 Socio-Legal Review, pp. 92-104.

Evaluating Bruce Ackerman’s ‘Pathways to Constitutionalism’ and India as an exemplar of ‘revolutionary constitutionalism on a human scale’, Vol 17 (2) International Journal of Constitutional Law (I.CON) 2019, 682-89, pp. 9.

Book Chapters: 

‘The Intertwining of liberalism and illiberalism in the Indian Constitutional Tradition’ in Andras Sajo, Stephen Holmes and Renata Uitz (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Illiberalism (forthcoming 2021), pp. 736-52.  

‘India’s Constitutional Founding: An enduring but mixed legacy’ in Constitutional Foundings in South Asia (Kevin Tan and Ridwanul Hoque, eds, Hart Publishing UK, 2021), pp.  19-62. 

‘Constitutional Change, Basic Structure and Constitutional Politics: Insights from the Indian experience’ in Henning Glaser (ed.), Identity and Change – The Basic Structure in Asian Constitutional Orders (German Southeast Asian Centre for Public Policy and Governance: Bangkok, forthcoming 2021), 21 pp. 

Op-eds:

‘‘Are courts encroaching on the powers of the executive’ The Hindu (Jan 22, 2021), 

Podcast:

‘Are courts encroaching on the powers of the executive’ The Hindu Parley podcast (Jan 2021) (This is an expanded version of the op-ed above)  

Public Talk:

‘The Making of the Indian Constitution: A focus on Process and Methods’ delivered as a public lecture at the workshop on “The Idea of the Indian Constitution, Chapter II,’ organized by Takshila Foundation and History for Peace project at the Delhi Public School, Pune, between Feb 07-09, 2020.  

Click here for Arun’s SSRN page where some of his publications are freely accessible.