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. and M.A. from Cambridge University and an LLM. from Harvard Law School.

Professor Kapur is currently working as a Visiting Professor of Law at the Queen Mary University of London. Her regular position is that of Distinguished Faculty, Symbiosis Law School, India. She was a Global Professor of Law at Jindal Global Law School, Sonepat, NCR-Delhi India, and former head to the Centre for Feminist Legal Research in New Delhi, India. She is also a Senior Faculty member at the International Global Law and Policy Institute at 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. She has also been a visiting fellow at Cambridge University and Harvard University.

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

Kapur serves on the international advisory boards of the academic journals Legal Studies and Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society.

Works

Ratna Kapur is a global legal scholar with an international standing. She has lectured and published on issues of human rights, international law, and constitutional law, in particular on secularism, freedom of expression, equality, and women's rights around the world. She has written extensively on issues such as Triple Talaq, Aruna Shaunbag, sex work, same-sex marriage, marital rape, sexual harassment, etc.

Books:

• 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)

Selected Publications:

• “Managing Alterity through Gender Equality” (forthcoming 2018 Feminist Legal Studies)
• “Conversations with Law’s Others”, in Peer Zumbansen ed., Research Handbook on The Politics of Transnational Law: Contestations-Knowledges-Geographies (forthcoming Edward Elgar Press)
• “Secularism, Religion and Citizenship,” in Susanna Mancini, ed., Handbook on Constitutions and Religion (forthcoming, Edward Elgar Press).
• “Postcolonial Feminism and Law”, in Robin West and Cynthia Bowman, eds., Research Handbook on Feminist Jurisprudence (Legal Theory Research Encyclopedia) (forthcoming, Edward Elgar Press)
• “Transnational Feminist Legal Theory”, in Peer Zumbansen, ed., Oxford Handbook on Transnational Law (forthcoming Oxford University Press)
• “The (Im)-Possibility of Queering International Law”, in Dianne Otto, ed., Queering International Human Rights (forthcoming Oxford University Press)
• The Colonial Debris of Bandung: Equality and Facilitating the Rise of the Hindu Right” in Luis Eslava, Michael Fakhri and Vasuki Nesiah, eds., Bandung, Global History and International Law: Critical Pasts and Pending Futures (forthcoming Cambridge University Press, 2017)
• Book Reviews: On Wendy Doniger and Martha Nussbaum, eds. Pluralism and Democracy in India” Journal of Religion and Law (forthcoming 2017).
• Book Review: On Ben Golder, Foucault and the Politics of Rights,39(4) University of New South Wales Law Journal 1472 (2016)
• “Precarious Desires and Ungrievable Lives: Human Rights and Postcolonial Critiques of Legal Justice” 3(2) London Review of International Law 267 (2015)
• “The “Ayodhya” Case: Hindu Majoritarianism and the Right to Religious Liberty” 29 Maryland Journal of International Law 305 (Fall 2014)
• “In the Aftermath of Critique We are not in Epistemic Free Fall: Human Rights, the Subaltern Subject, and the Non-Liberal Search for Freedom and Happiness” 25 (1) Law and Critique 25-45 (2014)
• “A Leap of Faith: The Construction of Hindu Majoritarianism through Secular Law” 113 (1) South Atlantic Quarterly 109-128 (2014).
• “Brutalized Bodies and Sexy Dressing on the Indian Street” 40 SIGNS: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1 (2014)
• “Gender, Sovereignty, and the Rise of a Sexual Security Regime in International Law and Postcolonial India”, 14(2) Melbourne Journal of International Law 1-26 (2013)
• “Un-Veiling Equality: Disciplining the “Other” Woman through Human Rights Discourse” in Mark Ellis, Anver Emon (eds.) Islamic and International Law; Searching for Common Ground, 265-290 (Oxford University Press, 2012)
• “Hecklers to Power? The Waning of Liberal Rights and Challenges to Feminism in South Asia” in Ania Loomba and Ritty Lukose, eds., South Asian Feminisms, 333-355 (Duke University Press 2012)
• “Emancipatory Feminist Theory in Postcolonial India” in Aakash Rathore Singh and Silika Mohapatra (eds.) Indian Political Thought: A Reader, 257-268 (Routledge 2010)
• “De-Radicalizing the Rights Claims of Sexual Subalterns Through ‘Tolerance’” in Kim Brooks and Robert Leckey, eds., Queer Empire: Comparative Theory, 37-52 (Routledge, 2010)
• “Human Rights Impact of Anti-Trafficking Laws: A Case Study of India”, in Collateral Damage, 114-141 (Global Alliance Against the Trafficking of Women: Bangkok, 2007.)
• Faith and the Good Liberal: Construction of Female Subjectivity in Anti-Trafficking Discourse” in Vanessa Munro and Carl Stychin, eds,, Sexuality and the Law: Feminist Engagements, 223-258 (Cavendish 2007)
• “Postcolonial Profanities: The Legal Regulation of Free Speech in India” in Brinda Bose and Subhabrata Bhattacharya, eds., The Phobic and the Erotic: The Politics of Sexualities in Contemporary India, 235-254 ( University of Chicago Press 2007)
• “Normalizing Violence: Transnational Justice and the Gujarat Riots” 15:3 Columbia Journal of Gender and Human Rights 885-927 (2006)
• “Human Rights in the 21st Century: Taking a Walk on the Dark Side”, 28:4 Sydney Law Review 665-687 (2006)
• “Speaking from the Margins: The Legal Regulation of Sexuality in Postcolonial India,” in Karen Gabriel, ed., Gender Justice in India: A Reader (Katha: Delhi, 2005)
• “Revisioning the Role of Law in Women’s Human Rights Struggles” in S. Mekled-Garcia, ed., The Legalisation of Human Rights, 101-116 (Routledge 2005)
• “Women, Gender and Freedom of Expression, and Freedom of Religious Expression: South Asia,” in Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures, (Brill 2004)
• Women, Gender and Secularism: Afghanistan, India and Bangladesh in Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures, (Brill 2004)
• “Collateral Damage: Sacrificing Legitimacy in the Search for Justice”, 24:1 Harvard International Review 42 (Spring 2002)
• “The Tragedy of Victimization: Implications for International Women’s Rights and Post-Colonial Feminist Legal Politics”, 15 Harvard Human Rights Journal, 1 (Spring, 2002)
• “The Right to Freedom of Religion and Secularism in the Indian Constitution” in Mark Tushnet and Vicki Jackson, eds, Defining the Field of Comparative Constitutional Law, 199-213 (Praeger Publishers 2002)
• “Neutrality and Universality in Human Rights Law” in Norman Dorsen and Prosser Gifford, eds., Democracy and the Rule of Law, 390-394 (Washington, D.C: Congressional Quarterly Press 2001)
• “The Two Faces of Secularism and Women’s Rights in India” in Courtney Howland, ed., Religion and Fundamentalism, 143-154 (Palgrave Macmillan 1999)
• “Secularism’s Last Sigh? Democracy, the Hindu Right and Law in India” 38:1 Harvard International Law Journal (January, 1997).

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 in the Supreme Court. She has also litigated on issues of equality, freedom of speech and expression, as well as the rights of women in religious minority communities.

She has advised on issues of trafficking, equality, religious freedoms and migration to international legal institutions, including the United Nations. In her scholarship, she has challenged the carceral turn in women's rights, and its focus on criminal law as well as alignment with the state for redress. She has engaged with the legal justice movement and also examined 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.