Surbhi Karwa

Surbhi Karwa is currently a Lecturer at the Jindal Global Law School and a Senior Research Associate at the Centre for Justice, Law and Society (CJLS). She is also part of the Centre for Constitutional Law Studies, where she is working to curate conversations on constitutionalism in South Asia.

She completed her BCL from the University of Oxford with Distinction and won the Law Faculty Prize for the best performance in three of her courses. She studied courses on International Human Rights Law, Family Law, Constitutionalism, and Comparative Equality Law at the University of Oxford. During her LL.M., she wrote her thesis on Women Members of India’s Constituent Assembly and was a gold medalist in her cohort. She was also the highest-ranked student in a variety of subjects during her LL.B. Additionally, she is UGC-NET qualified.

At Jindal, she has taught courses on Environmental Law and Professional Ethics. She has previously also taught an elective on ‘Feminist Constitutionalism: The Making of India’s Constitution’ as visiting faculty at the National Law University, Delhi, and the National Law School of India University, Bangalore.

She has longstanding experience working with research and training organizations. She has been a Bonavero Institute Fellow at the Socio-Economic Rights Institute, South Africa, where she worked on socio-economic rights, hate speech, and social grants. In India, she has previously worked with Partners for Law in Development, where she co-authored a report on the working of child marriage laws in India. Her research experience also includes work at the Delhi Judicial Academy and in the chambers of Senior Advocate Indira Jaising.

She strongly believes in making academic literature available in accessible formats, and hence has frequently commented on various media publications on issues of law and gender. These include-the Wire, Economic and Political Weekly Engaged, Outlook, Hindustan Times, LiveLaw, Frontline, Article 14, the Leaflet, Behanbox, and Mainstream Weekly. She has also been quoted in national and international media outlets on legal and gender issues including at the Washington Post, the Globe and the Mail, the Print, etc.

She is currently working with Prof. Tarunabh Khaitan on a book on constitutional theory in Hindi. This book project was initially supported by the University of Melbourne.

Her areas of interest are constitutional law, constitutional theory, feminist theory, marginalization, and law.