Biography

Pavani Nagaraja Bhat is an Assistant Professor at Jindal Global Law School. Prof. Bhat graduated from National Law University Odisha (NLUO) with a B.A.LL.B. (Hons) in 2017. She was the recipient of the university gold medal for the best all-round female student. Following her graduation, Prof. Bhat worked with the Police Reforms team of the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative. There, she conducted research on arrest, police misconduct, and accountability. She supported strategic litigation at the Supreme Court of India and Delhi High Court. 

In 2019, Prof. Bhat pursued the LLM at Harvard University, where she was also a student attorney at the International Human Rights Clinic. Her LLM dissertation was a comparative doctrinal study on the right to counsel for persons in custody. She was the recipient of the J.N. Tata Endowment for Higher Education of Indians Abroad. 

In 2020, the Harvard Human Rights Program awarded her the Satter Human Rights Fellowship to work with Legal Action Worldwide. She documented conflict-related sexual violence committed during the Syrian Civil War and prepared case files to international courts and to the U.N. Special Procedures. She also investigated and authored reports on the 2020 Beirut port explosion and sexual violence committed during the Lebanese Civil Wars.

Between 2022 to 2024, Prof. Bhat worked with Fortify Rights documenting mass atrocities committed in Myanmar following the 2021 military coup. She supported documentation across teams working in Myanmar, Bangladesh, and Thailand, and focused particularly on accountability efforts.

In Spring 2025, Prof. Bhat was a Visiting Researcher at Harvard Law School, where she worked on an independent project exploring the colonial origins of authoritarianism in South Asia. Drawing from years of experience working on authoritarianism and conflict-affected societies, her research interests lie in the intersection of law, political science, and history.