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.

In this episode of the LAOT Podcast, Arnav Mathur speaks with Justice D.Y. Chandrachud, former Chief Justice of India, about the deep structural fault lines running through the Indian judiciary, from the district courts to the Supreme Court collegium. The conversation charts the widening gap between the constitutional promise of accessible justice and the everyday reality of litigants navigating a system built around lawyers, judges, and the state rather than the people it is meant to serve. Together, they examine the true drivers of India's crore-scale case backlog, unpacking how delay, opaque procedure, and a culture of adjournments impose both economic and human costs far beyond simplistic narratives of "too many cases, too few judges." They trace the promise and limits of the e-Courts digitisation drive, from NSTEP and e-Sewa Kendras to the risk of a digital divide that leaves the most under-resourced litigants and lawyers further behind. The discussion turns to the district judiciary, dissecting flawed performance metrics that reward volume over complexity, the contentious reinstatement of the three-year practice rule, and the case for an All India Judicial Service. Finally, they interrogate the collegium system itself, Chandrachud's frank admission of its institutional blind spots, the absence of data-driven evaluation, the informal role government already plays, and the quiet, undisclosed logic behind judicial transfers. }Throughout, the conversation returns to a central thesis: that reform is less about adding new mechanisms than about redesigning the system around the litigant's experience, and about building the institutional trust that has eroded in its absence.

In this episode of the LAOT Podcast, Arnav Mathur speaks with Senior Advocate Jayana Kothari (Founder and Executive Director, Centre for Law and Policy Research) about the India’s highly controversial passage of the Transgender Persons (Amendment) Act, 2026.The conversation charts the turbulent legal arc of transgender rights in India, tracking the widening chasm between the transformative constitutional promises of the NALSA and Navtej Singh Johar judgments and the restrictive realities of legislative codification. Together, they analyze the 2026 Act’s elimination of the right to self-perceived gender identity, its regression toward a rigid, state-controlled medical model, and the severe legal and practical consequences of narrowing the definition of a transgender person to exclude trans men, trans women, and genderqueer individuals. They unpack the alarming privacy risks of mandatory surgical reporting, the chilling effect of new criminal provisions that threaten to penalize socio-cultural community groups, and how Judith Butler’s theories of gender performance clash with the state's insistence on a biological binary. Finally, they reflect on the cyclical, "steps forward, steps back" nature of constitutional rights litigation and the enduring resilience required to sustain the battle for equality on the ground.

In 1979, four law professors wrote a letter to the Chief Justice of India. Published in newspapers. Addressed to the highest court in the land. That letter changed India's rape law forever. One of those professors is my guest today.Professor Upendra Baxi is 86 years old. He is Emeritus Professor at the Universities of Warwick and Delhi, former Vice-Chancellor of Delhi University, and the man who invented Social Action Litigation — the legal tool that gave India's poorest citizens direct access to the Supreme Court. His books have been cited by the International Court of Justice. He published a new column ten days before we recorded this.In this conversation, we cover:→ Why India's justice system has 55 million pending cases — and who is actually responsible→ Why he calls "fair globalisation" an oxymoron — and coins the term "Baxi-moron"→ The Bhopal gas tragedy: what really happened in court, why the victims never got justice, and what that tells us about corporate power→ Ambedkar's Articles 17, 23 and 24 — and why the Dalit labour movement is missing from every global "decent work" conversation→ Why the word "Justice" has almost disappeared from global governance — and who benefits from that erasure→ AI, gig workers, and what the ILO has no answer for→ What gives him hope — and what worries him most about Indian law in 2026

Can the constitutional right to life ever truly accommodate non-human sentience, or is public law destined to view animals as a mere civic menace? When a court steps into a urban crisis governed by fragile municipal infrastructure, contested science, and deep moral polarization, where does its legitimate authority end? And what happens when a judicial order, issued in the name of safeguarding children from stray dogs, triggers a wave of public panic and unlawful culling on the ground?In this episode of the LAOT Podcast, Arnav Mathur speaks with Vivek Mukherjee (Faculty Coordinator, Animal Law Center, NALSAR University of Law) about the Supreme Court of India’s recent final judgment in the high-stakes suo motu case, "In Re: City Hounded by Strays, Kids Pay the Price."The conversation charts the turbulent, multi-stage arc of the litigation, from an initial, sweeping blanket pickup order to a complex final ruling permitting the conditional euthanasia of dangerous stray dogs and stripping away "re-release" protections in institutional areas. Together, they analyze the court's controversial invocation of Article 142 to carve out statutory exceptions, the practical and financial impossibilities faced by underfunded municipal bodies mandated to build Animal Birth Control (ABC) centers, and the "symbolic authority" of judicial text that can inadvertently license public cruelty. Finally, they discuss NALSAR’s own court-sanctioned campus model as a beacon for humane, student-driven coexistence, and explore how Indian environmental jurisprudence might eventually break free from a strictly anthropocentric binary toward a more inclusive "natural contract."

Can artificial intelligence actually fix an overburdened judiciary? Why do legal tech innovations so often get trapped in the clerical "plumbing" of the registry rather than transforming the core of adjudication? And when automated systems introduce new threats, from cognitive atrophy to fake citations, does the legal system have any real safeguards?In this episode of the LAOT Podcast, Arnav Mathur speaks with Anya Batra (Co-founder and COO of Janna AI) about what technology can and cannot realistically do for the justice delivery system, and why fixing Indian courts is as much an economic and political economy challenge as a technological one.The conversation spans the structural dysfunction of court registries and the critical need for a "triage" system, the macroeconomic impact of frozen credit trapped in commercial suits, the ethical boundaries of machine-shaped judicial discretion, and Anya's threefold test of traceability, completeness, and contestability. It also examines the delicate balance between public-private collaboration, the phenomenon of cognitive atrophy in automated white-collar work, and whether permissionless innovation gives India a distinct advantage over heavily regulated frameworks like the EU AI Act.