Biography

Dr Shivaraj Huchhanavar is an Associate Professor at Jindal Global Law School (JGLS), O.P. Jindal Global University. He holds a PhD from Durham University, UK, an LLM (with First Rank and a Gold Medal) from Karnataka State Law University, and a BALLB from Karnataka University, Dharwad. Before joining JGLS, Dr Shivaraj worked as a tutor at the School of Law, Durham University, and as a Research Fellow at the National Judicial Academy of India [NJA], Bhopal. At NJA, he designed and delivered over 20 judicial training programmes – including conferences, workshops, and retreats – for judges from India, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh.

Dr Shivaraj’s forthcoming book, Independent Judiciary, Dependent Judges, aims to offer a critical examination of informal, opaque and in-house regulatory practices that shape the decisional autonomy and service conditions of lower court judges in India. The book will situate regulatory practices within the broader debates on judicial governance, independence, accountability and transparency, highlighting gaps in internal governance structures. His current research traces the gradual consolidation of judicial self-governance in India through judicial rulings since the 1960s and its implications for judicial governance theory and practice.
Dr Shivaraj’s recent collaborative research has explored the use of AutoML and XAI tools to predict delays in Indian lower courts, while also examining the potential of domain-specific language models to enhance the efficacy of legal chatbots. In another line of collaborative work, he has led a study on occupational stress among India’s district judges, contributing to a growing body of scholarship on judicial stress.

Dr Shivaraj’s PhD research critically examines judicial conduct regulation regimes in India and the UK, foregrounding their implications for judicial independence and accountability in both jurisdictions. Publications emerging from his PhD research emphasise that judicial conduct regulation regimes should adequately emphasise all three facets of judicial independence: individual, internal, and institutional. His research demonstrates that, while regulatory regimes in India tend to undermine individual and internal judicial independence, those in the UK comparatively underemphasise internal judicial independence.