Professor Tarun Khaitan

Professor Tarun Khaitan

Professor (Chair) of Public Law

LSE Law School

Room No
Cheng Kin Ku Building 7.22
Languages
Bengali, English, Hindi
Key Expertise
public law, legal theory, constitutional design, discrimination law

About me

Tarun Khaitan is the Professor (Chair) of Public Law at the LSE Law School and an Honorary Professorial Fellow at Melbourne Law School. Previously, he has been the Head of Research at the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights (Oxford), the Professor of Public Law and Legal Theory (Oxford), Vice Dean (Faculty of Law, Oxford), and a Visiting Professor of Law (Chicago, Harvard, and NYU law schools).

He completed his undergraduate studies (BA LLB Hons) at the National Law School (Bangalore) in 2004 as the 'Best All-Round Graduating Student'. He then came to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and completed his postgraduate studies at Exeter College. His research has been cited in over a dozen cases by influential courts, including the Indian Supreme Court, the Canadian Supreme Court, the European Court of Human Rights, the Israeli Supreme Court, the Pakistani Supreme Court, the Madras High Court, the High Court of Kerala, the Superior Court of Quebec, the Supreme Court of Nova Scotia, and in the Opinion of the Advocate General before the European Court of Justice (a list of these cases is available here).

Research interests

His primary research interests are comparative public law, legal theory, discrimination law. He is currently working on a monograph on constitutional design.

Teaching

Books

Prof Khaitan’s monograph entitled A Theory of Discrimination Law (OUP 2015 hbk, South Asia edition and Oxford Scholarship Online, 2016 pbk) was reviewed very positively in leading journals, including in Law and Philosophy, where Sophia Moreau said "In this magnificent and wide-ranging book ... Khaitan attempts what very few others have tried." In Ethics, Deborah Hellman said that its 'ambitious scope and the careful argumentation it contains make it one of the best in the field’.  In his review in the Modern Law Review, Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen claimed that "Khaitan's account is sophisticated, extensive and among the best normative accounts of discrimination law available." Colm O'Cinneide's review in the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies says that "Khaitan’s quest shows up the inadequacies of previous attempts to track down this Holy Grail, and the path he has laid down will encourage others to follow in his footsteps." The book won the Woodward Medal (with a cash prize of 10,000 Australian dollars) in 2019 for making ‘a significant contribution to knowledge in a field of humanities and social sciences.’ Links to reviews of the book are available here.

He co-edited Foundations of Indirect Discrimination Law(Bloomsbury, 2018) with Prof Hugh Collins, and contributed two co-authored chapters to the volume. This collection was the outcome of a major international workshop with leading discrimination law scholars to rethink the moral foundations of the legal prohibition of indirect discrimination in the face of growing judicial hostility towards it. Chapters from the volume have been cited by the Canadian Supreme Court, the Indian Supreme Court, the Court of Appeal for Ontario, the Madras High Court, the Superior Court of Quebec, and the Kerala High Court.

Constitutional Resilience in South Asia(co-edited with Ms Swati Jhaveri & Dr Dinesha Samararatne, Bloomsbury, 2023) was the outcome of a workshop on South Asian public law organised by Prof Khaitan at Melbourne Law School in 2019. The contributions consider the design and functioning of an array of institutions and actors, including political parties, legislatures, the political executive, the bureaucracy, courts, fourth branch / guarantor institutions (such as electoral commissions), the people, and the military to examine their roles in strengthening or undermining constitutional democracy across South Asia. Each chapter offers a contextual and jurisdictionally-tethered account of the causes behind the erosion of constitutional democracy, and some examine the resilience of constitutional institutions against democratic erosion.

Another collection titled The Entrenchment of Democracy, co-edited with Profs Tom Ginsburg & Aziz Huq, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press in 2024.

Book chapters

  • ‘Aversive Constitutionalism’ in Catherine O’Regan, Sujit Choudhry, and Carlos Bernal eds., Research Handbook on Constitutional Interpretation (Elgar 2024 forthcoming)
  • ‘Indirect Discrimination Law: Controversies and Critical Questions’ (co-authored with Prof Hugh Collins) in Hugh Collins and Tarunabh Khaitan eds., Foundations of Indirect Discrimination Law (Bloomsbury 2018) 1–30
    • Cited by the Canadian Supreme Court in Fraser v Canada 2020 SCC 28
    • Cited by the Indian Supreme Court in Nitisha v India 2021 (the introductory chapter co-authored by me was cited)
  • Discrimination’ in Max Planck Encyclopedia of Comparative Constitutional Law (Max Planck Foundation for International Peace and Rule of Law 2017)
  • ‘Indirect discrimination’ in Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen ed, Routledge Handbook of the Ethics of Discrimination (Routledge 2017) 30–41
    • Cited by the CJEU Advocate General in Instituto Nacional de la Seguridad Social (Case C‑625/20)

Articles

A full list of Prof Khaitan’s publications is available here.

Peer Reviewed Articles

  • ‘Guarantor Institutions’ (2021) 16(S1) Asian Journal of Comparative Law S40-S59
    • Cited by the Pakistani Supreme Court in Sunni Ittehad Council v Election Commission of Pakistan (2024)

 

Non-Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles

Policy briefings

External activities

Prof Khaitan was the founding General Editor of the Indian Law Review and founder & advisor of the Junior Faculty Forum for Indian Law Teachers. He sits on the advisory board of the International Journal of Comparative Law, is a member of the European University Institute's Research Council, and is a trustee of the Equal Rights Trust.

Public engagement

Prof Khaitan was awarded the 2018 Letten Prize, a 2 Million Norwegian Kroner award given biennially to a young researcher under the age of 45 conducting excellent research of great social relevance. He is using a part of the award towards setting up the Indian Equality Law Programme, aimed at capacity-building for early-career scholars. In 2020, he was awarded the Excellence in Engagement award by the University of Melbourne. Prof Pratap Mehta said in the context of this award that “No discussion of the rights of minorities in India is now conceivable without engaging with his conceptual and legal arguments”. At Oxford, he received the Oxford Policy Engagement Fellowship Award in 2020 and a special mention by the O2RB Excellence in Impact Award in 2021. In 2023, he received the India-UK Achievers Honour from the National Indian Students and Alumni Union. He helped draft the Indian Anti-Discrimination and Equality Bill, introduced in the Indian Parliament in 2017.

Prof Khaitan writes regularly for newspapers and blogs: links to his columns are available here. His podcast course on Indian constitutionalism (in Hindi), संविधान संवाद, can be downloaded here. He has served on the advisory board of the United Nation’s Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner’s effort to draft ‘A Practical Guide to Developing Comprehensive Anti-Discrimination Legislation’.