In this episode of the LAOT Podcast, Vivek Jadhav and Hamza Khan speak with Prakruthi Jain, a 2025 NALSAR graduate and petitioner-in-person before the Supreme Court, about her challenge to the Bar Council of India’s circulars regulating law students. The conversation examines the BCI’s mandates requiring CCTV surveillance in classrooms, biometric attendance, and disclosure of criminal antecedents at the stages of admission and issuance of final marksheets and degrees.Together, they unpack the limits of the BCI’s regulatory authority, the constitutional concerns surrounding privacy, arbitrary discretion, and the chilling effect of surveillance, and the implications of making students’ access to legal education contingent on their criminal records. The discussion also explores the broader debate around mandatory attendance, internships, the quality of legal education, and whether students are being unfairly treated as the sole stakeholders responsible for systemic shortcomings in legal education.Finally, Prakruthi reflects on her experience appearing as a petitioner-in-person before the Supreme Court and what her case reveals about the space available to young advocates and students to challenge regulatory action.

In this episode of the LAOT Podcast, Arnav Mathur speaks with Dr. Sidharth Chauhan (Assistant Professor, NLSIU Bangalore) about the persistent neglect of electoral reservations within India's constitutional jurisprudence on affirmative action. The conversation traces why political representation, despite predating and arguably outweighing reservations in education and employment in consequence, has generated only a thin body of case law, and argues that this neglect stems from its exclusion from the fundamental rights chapter and its roots in a colonial logic of consociationalism rather than constitutional social transformation. Together, they examine the doctrinal confusion in the Krishna Murthy judgment, which distinguishes political barriers from socio-economic ones yet still imports the 50% reservation ceiling and creamy layer anxieties from education and employment jurisprudence, and unpack the practical fallout of this contradiction across Telangana, Maharashtra, and Uttar Pradesh. They discuss why subclassification, creamy layer exclusion, and religious conversion bars may be poorly suited to the logic of electoral consolidation, and debate whether breaching the 50% ceiling could, in fact, be the more constitutionally coherent path forward for political representation specifically. Finally, drawing on the legal theory of Niklas Luhmann and Günther Teubner, they reflect on why courts, even when equipped to recognize a domain as conceptually distinct, tend to fall back on borrowed doctrine, and what it would take for adjudication to build a genuinely independent theory of political equality.

In this episode of the LAOT Podcast, Arnav Mathur speaks with Mustafa Rajkotwala (Senior Legal Engineer, NYAI) about how artificial intelligence is reshaping legal education, early-career practice, and regulation in India. The conversation is anchored by a pivotal moment: the Supreme Court's June 2026 draft AI regulations for courts, and its subsequent ruling in Pooja Ramesh Singh v. Jammu and Kashmir Bank, where fabricated, AI-hallucinated precedents were struck down and the Bar Council of India was directed to examine the issue. Against this backdrop, Mathur and Rajkotwala trace the structural gaps in India's legal education system, from the 2008 Bar Council rules that never anticipated AI to the widening divide between elite law schools building their own AI centres and the fifteen-hundred-plus colleges left reliant on bare regulatory mandates. They examine what AI means for junior lawyers, questioning whether automating "grunt work" erodes the traditional osmosis through which young associates learn the profession, and unpack the case for a hybrid model where human judgment remains firmly in the loop. The discussion turns to Rajkotwala's own path from corporate practice at Khaitan & Co. to legal AI, and what that shift signals for freshers considering legal tech over traditional practice. Finally, they weigh the merits of industry self-regulation against formal rulemaking, drawing on comparisons to the ABA's Formal Opinion 512 and the history of Britain's Red Flag Act, and close on a shared conviction that no technology can substitute for a lawyer's judgment, only sharpen it.