Three graduates of the National Law School of India University (NLSIU), Bangalore have been appointed as Professors at Oxford University, London.
Dev Gangjee has been appointed as Professor of Intellectual Property Law, while Tarunabh Khaitan has been appointed as Professor of Public Law and Legal Theory.
Another NLSIU grad, Lavanya Rajamani, was also appointed as a Professor of International Environmental Law at the Faculty of Law, Oxford in August last year. She chose to take up the position from this academic year. Rajamani is also a Yamani Fellow in Public International Law, St Peter’s College, Oxford.
With these appointments, there will be three NLSIU graduates teaching at Oxford at the same time, for the first time ever.
Gangjee graduated from NLSIU in 2000, and went on to study at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. He was a Senior Lecturer at the London School of Economics from 2005-13. He then joined Oxford in 2013 as a University Lecturer in Intellectual Property as well as a Tutorial Fellow at St Hilda’s College. He is also the Director of the Oxford Diploma in IP Law and Practice.
His areas of specialisation include Intellectual Property, with a special emphasis on Branding and Trade Marks, Geographical Indications and Copyright law.
Khaitan is a 2004 graduate of NLSIU. Also a Rhodes Scholar, he completed his postgraduate studies (BCL with distinction, MPhil with distinction, DPhil) at Exeter College. He was the Penningtons Student (Fellow) in Law at Christ Church before being appointed an Associate Professor and the Hackney Fellow in Law at Wadham College, Oxford University.
He has been on special leave for four years since September 1. During this period, he has been a Future Fellow at the University of Melbourne to work on his research project on the resilience of democratic constitutions, with a focus on South Asia.
He was instrumental in drafting the Anti Discrimination and Equality Bill, 2017, which lapsed in the Lok Sabha. His research has been cited by the Supreme Court in the Navtej Singh Johar judgment, in which Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code was read down.
Rajamani is a 1996 graduate of NLSIU. She holds an LL.M. from Yale University, as well as a D.Phil and BCL from Oxford, where she was a Rhodes scholar. She has served as a consultant to the UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) Secretariat and has advised the Indian Ministry of Environment and Forests, the Danish Ministry of Climate Change, the World Bank, and the UNDP.
She was a faculty member at at Queens’ College, Cambridge University.She has also taught at the Hague Academy of International Law, University of Aix-Marseille, Osaka Gakuin University, and the University of Bologna.