Ratna Kapur

Ratna Kapur (born 1959) is a law professor and Director of the Centre for Feminist Legal Research in New Delhi, India.

Education and career

She has a B.A., M.A. from Cambridge University and LLM. from Harvard Law School.^[1]

Professor Kapur is a Global Professor of Law at Jindal Global Law School, Sonepat, NCR-Delhi India, former head to the Centre for Feminist Legal Research in New Delhi, India.^[2] She is also Senior Faculty member at the Institute of Global Law and Policy, Harvard Law School.

She has worked as a practising lawyer in India and been a visiting Professor at a number of universities around the world, including Yale Law School, NYU School of Law, Georgetown University Law Centre, UN Peace University (Costa Rica) and the National Law School of India, Bangalore; served also been a visiting fellow at Cambridge and Harvard Universities.

She has taught and published extensively on human rights, international law, postcolonial theory, and legal theory.

Works

She has lectured and published extensively on issues of human rights, international law, and constitutional law in particular on secularism, freedom of expression, equality and women's rights.

Some of the books she has published^[3] are :

• An edited collection entitled Feminist Terrains in Legal Domains: Interdisciplinary Essays on Women and Law(Kali for Women, New Delhi, 1996)
• She has co-authored Subversive Sites: Feminist Engagements with Law (1996) with Brenda Cossman;
• Secularism's Last Sigh?: Hinduvata and the (Mis)Rule of Law (Oxford University Press, 1999, reprinted 2001)).
• Erotic Justice: Law and the New Politics of Postcolonialism (Cavendish: London, 2005)

Makeshift Migrants and Law: Gender, Belonging and Postcolonial Anxieties (Routledge, 2010) Freedom in a Fishbowl (forthcoming Edward Elgar Press, 2018)

Interventions made

She is one of the intervenors in the case of Suresh Kaushal Case, a constitutional challenge brought by several groups to section 377 of the Indian Penal Code that criminalises sodomy ^[4] in the Supreme Court.

She has challenged the carceral turn in women's rights, and its focus on the criminal law as well as alignment with the state for redress. She has engaged with the legal justice movement and also examining different approaches to rights and engagements with law from the perspective of the subaltern, including religious and sexual minorities as well as women. She has also addressed issues of the right to free speech, secularism, freedom of religion and freedom..^[5]

References