75 Years of the Indian Constitution: Reflections and Challenges
As the Indian Constitution completes 75 years since it was adopted, we bring together legal historians, constitutional scholars, and practitioners to reflect on the Constitution’s journey, interrogating the friction between transformative founding ideals and contemporary institutional pressure. The symposium will address questions around fundamental rights, federalism, institutional checks and balances, regulation of religion, family, gender and sexuality, and reflect a range of methods from doctrinal readings, legal history, political theory, quantitative reasoning and critical frameworks.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Aparna Chandra is a Professor of Law at the National Law School of India University, Bengaluru, where she also holds the M.K. Nambyar Chair on Constitutional Law. Aparna teaches and writes on Indian constitutional law, comparative constitutional law, gender and the law, judicial process reform, and empirical legal studies. Aparna is the co-author (with William Hubbard and Sital Kalantry) of Court on Trial: A Data Driven Account of the Supreme Court of India (2023). The book provides a quantitative empirical account of the working of the Indian Supreme Court. She is also the co-editor (with Gautam Bhatia and Niraja Gopal Jayal) of the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to the Constitution of India (2026).
Gautam Bhatia is a practicing lawyer based in New Delhi, India, and a legal scholar. He is the author of a trilogy of books on the Indian Constitution, including The Transformative Constitution: A Radical Biography in Nine Acts (2019), Unsealed Covers: A Decade of the Constitution, the Courts and the State (2023), and The Indian Constitution: A Conversation with Power (2025). His scholarly work is informed by his involvement with contemporary Indian constitutional cases, such as the same-sex marriage case, the challenge to the removal of the State of Jammu and Kashmir's autonomous status, the right to privacy case, and others.
Akshat Agarwal is a J.S.D. candidate at Yale Law School, where he served as the Tutor in Law from 2022-2024. He is currently the Drinan Visiting Assistant Professor at Boston College Law School where he is teaching courses on family law. Before coming to Yale, Akshat worked in one of India’s leading think-tanks in New Delhi and a top commercial law firm in Mumbai. Akshat researches and writes about the legal regulation of families and how societal contexts and the political economy shape the law and are shaped by it. His JSD dissertation focuses on the changing law of parent-child relationships and its impact on legal concepts such as parenthood, parents’ rights, and children’s interests. Akshat’s current project seeks to normatively reframe the law’s understanding of children’s interests and parenthood to reflect the rise of non-traditional families more accurately.
Rohit De is Associate Professor of History and Chair of the South Asian Studies Council at Yale University. He is a historian of South Asia and the British common law world. He is the author of A People's Constitution: The Everyday Law in the Indian Republic (2018) and co-author (with Ornit Shani) of Assembling India's Constitution: A New Democratic History (2025).