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About
Tarun Khaitan is the Professor (Chair) of Public Law at the LSE Law School and an Honorary Professorial Fellow at Melbourne Law School. Previously, he has been the Head of Research at the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights (Oxford), the Professor of Public Law and Legal Theory (Oxford), Vice Dean (Faculty of Law, Oxford), and a Visiting Professor of Law (Chicago, Harvard, and NYU law schools).
He completed his undergraduate studies (BA LLB Hons) at the National Law School (Bangalore) in 2004 as the 'Best All-Round Graduating Student'. He then came to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and completed his postgraduate studies at Exeter College. His research has been cited in over a dozen cases by influential courts, including the Indian Supreme Court, the Canadian Supreme Court, the European Court of Human Rights, the Israeli Supreme Court, the Pakistani Supreme Court, the Madras High Court, the High Court of Kerala, the Superior Court of Quebec, the Supreme Court of Nova Scotia, and in the Opinion of the Advocate General before the European Court of Justice (a list of these cases is available here). His research has also been in the Indian Parliament.
Research
Research Interests
His primary research interests are comparative public law, legal theory, discrimination law. He is currently working on a monograph on constitutional design.
Publications
Publications
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Teaching
Public Law (UG), Constitutionalisms in the Global South (LLM), Constitutionalism Beyond Courts (UG), Justifying Political Authority (UG), Philosophical Foundations of Discrimination Law (UG)
Engagement and impact
External Activities
Prof Khaitan was the founding General Editor of the Indian Law Reviewand founder & advisor of the Junior Faculty Forum for Indian Law Teachers. He sits on the advisory board of theInternational Journal of Comparative Law, is a member of the European University Institute's Research Council, and is a trustee of the Equal Rights Trust.
Public Engagement
Prof Khaitan was awarded the 2018 Letten Prize, a 2 Million Norwegian Kroner award given biennially to a young researcher under the age of 45 conducting excellent research of great social relevance. He is using a part of the award towards setting up the Indian Equality Law Programme, aimed at capacity-building for early-career scholars. In 2020, he was awarded the Excellence in Engagement award by the University of Melbourne. Prof Pratap Mehta said in the context of this award that "No discussion of the rights of minorities in India is now conceivable without engaging with his conceptual and legal arguments". At Oxford, he received the Oxford Policy Engagement Fellowship Award in 2020 and a special mention by the O2RB Excellence in Impact Award in 2021. In 2023, he received the India-UK Achievers Honour from the National Indian Students and Alumni Union. He helped draft the Indian Anti-Discrimination and Equality Bill, introduced in the Indian Parliament in 2017.
Prof Khaitan writes regularly for newspapers and blogs: links to his columns are available here. His podcast course on Indian constitutionalism (in Hindi), संविधान संवाद, can be downloaded here. He has served on the advisory board of the United Nation’s Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner’s effort to draft ‘A Practical Guide to Developing Comprehensive Anti-Discrimination Legislation’.