Professor Tarunabh Khaitan

Mansfield College is delighted to announce that from 1 July 2021, Professor Tarunabh Khaitan will become a Governing Body Fellow, upon taking up his position as  Head of Research at the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights, which has its home at Mansfield.

Professor Khaitan is currently the Professor of Public Law and Legal Theory at Wadham College, Oxford and a Vice Dean in the Faculty of Law in Oxford. He is also a professor and Future Fellow at Melbourne Law School, working on a project on constitutional resilience, with a focus on South Asia, and he is the founding General Editor of the Indian Law Review.  Professor Khaitan specialises in legal theory, constitutional law and discrimination law.  His monograph “A Theory of Discrimination Law” (OUP 2015) and related research has been cited by several senior courts. He was awarded the Woodward Medal in 2019 for making “a significant contribution to knowledge in a field of humanities and social sciences”.  Professor Khaitan has also been a recipient of the Letten Prize (2018) awarded biennially to a young researcher conducting excellent research of great social relevance.  He is also the founder and chief advisor of the Junior Faculty Forum, an initiative dedicated to building and improving research capacity in early career legal scholars on the Indian subcontinent.

Principal Helen Mountfield QC said: “I am proud and delighted that  Professor Khaitan will be joining Mansfield’s Governing Body. As well as his academic distinction, we are proud to be working with someone who so well understands and will contribute to the progressive and inclusive ethos of our College”.

Professor Kate O’Regan, the Director of the Bonavero Institute, noted that Professor Khaitan’s research interests in the broad fields of democracy, the rule of law and equality closely align with the research focus of the Bonavero. “We are thrilled to have such a brilliant scholar join the Bonavero Institute”, she said.