Madhav Khosla

Madhav Khosla is the B.R. Ambedkar Professor of Indian Constitutional Law and Professor of Political Science at Columbia University. He works across a range of questions in modern constitutionalism from a theoretical and comparative perspective. His many publications include India's Founding Moment: The Constitution of a Most Surprising Democracy, a study of the political thought of India's constitutional founding.

At the Institute, Khosla will be writing a book entitled Courting Authoritarianism. Authoritarian regimes are often thought to be lawless, or to the extent that they use law, to use it in strategic or instrumental ways. This project considers the role that law plays in authoritarian societies in creating legal duties and obligations, and how authoritarian law has its own inner logic and normativity. As such, it helps us consider the ways in which such regimes generate and sustain legitimacy.