Biography

Prof. Shruti Pandey is Professor of Legal Practice at the Jindal Global Law School. She has been a human rights lawyer, activist and practitioner for more than 25 years, having worked especially on public interest law and legal remedies, gender, health, disability, urbanization, and a range of related human rights issues and constituencies, from various institutional spaces and in various capacities. Before joining JGLS, she was the Human Rights Program Officer with the Ford Foundation’s Regional Office (India, Nepal and Sri Lanka) where she steered robust partnerships for strengthening grassroots legal remedies; a reinforcing legal education and ecosystem of community-based lawyers for rights of the marginalized communities; and later a wider set of interventions for inclusive urbanization. In post-conflict Sri Lanka and Nepal, she also supported constitutional transitions. In her early career, Shruti mainly litigated in the Supreme Court of India and the Delhi High Court, from the chambers of eminent lawyers, Indira Jaising and Indu Malhotra. Organizationally, she was also associated then with the Lawyers Collective, and later the Human Rights Law Network (HRLN) where she was the National Director for its Women’s Justice Initiative, and a Visiting Lawyer for Equality at INTERIGHTS (International Centre for Legal Protection of Human Rights) in London (UK), besides consulting for several other eminent national and international human rights institutions. During her litigation years, Shruti was also associated with several significant Public Interest Litigation (PIL) cases, and law reform on some major human rights issues. At the National Health Systems Resource Centre (NHSRC) of Government of India, she led the drafting of the National Health Bill (2009) for the government; and during the same period, she also drafted another government Bill to amend the abortion law in the country towards making it more rights based. Throughout she has also written and trained extensively to bridge the divide between laws, rights and their practice, having also been a founder co-editor of Combat Law. Shruti earned her BA Honours degree in History from Lady Shri Ram College, University of Delhi; LLB degree from Campus Law Centre, Faculty of Law, University of Delhi; and LLM degree from University of London (International Programs) with specialization in Public Law. She is currently a PhD scholar at JGU (since 2020 fall), and at the final stages of writing her PhD thesis.