Rupavardhini Balakrishnan Raju

I am currently completing a DPhil in Law and I am a Stipendiary Lecturer in Administrative Law at Trinity. I studied undergraduate law at NUJS, India and I have an LLM from Harvard Law School in the US where I was as a Fulbright scholar. I was a civil servant in the Government of India before moving to Oxford.

For my DPhil I am studying the relationship between nationalism and constitutions, and the way courts, legislators, and drafters of constitutions are shaped by, and shape, ideas of national identity.

Studying constitution making allows me a glimpse of founding ideals at various historical moments around the world. They are not perfect, and often things fall apart, but reading about the vision and hopes for the future that people bring into making a constitution for their countries is inspiring.

I teach Administrative Law to the second-year law undergraduates at Trinity.

My research interests are in the areas of Constitutional Theory and Law, Administrative Law, Comparative Constitutional Law, and Colonial Legal History.