Gaurav Mukherjee
Post-Doctoral Global Fellow
India
gm3225@nyu.edu
Gaurav is a Hauser Postdoctoral Global Fellow at NYU Law. He spent 2022-23 as a Visiting Doctoral Researcher at the NYU Law School. He holds an SJD in Comparative Constitutional Law from the Central European University, Vienna (CEU). Gaurav studies social welfare in authoritarian countries. His work charts how populist leaders and parties in hybrid democracies envision social constitutionalism, with a focus on comparing countries in the Global South like India & South Africa, with those in the Global North, like the United States.
Gaurav has held visiting fellowships at the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights at the University of Oxford, the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law, Heidelberg, and the University of Melbourne. In 2021, he was appointed as Social Rights Research Fellow as part of the University of Stirling’s Nuffield Foundation-funded project on Access to Justice for Social Rights: Addressing the Accountability Gap. The findings of this project shed light on the myriad ways claimants are denied access to social benefits and entitlements in the UK. The findings of the project generated considerable academic and practitioner interest and has been used by the Scottish National Party as a basis for demands for improving human rights in the country through greater devolution
Gaurav’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in the Oxford Handbook of Economic, Social & Cultural Rights, the International Journal of Constitutional Law, the American Journal of International Law (Unbound), South African Journal on Human Rights, the Indian Law Review, the University of Oxford Human Rights Hub Journal, Verfassungs und Recht in Übersee, and the Oxford Handbook on Comparative Human Rights.
Gaurav’s doctoral project, which received a Social & Economic Rights Associates (SERA)-Law & Society Association (LSA) Dissertation Grant, examined the contested role of courts as agents of progressive social transformation in India, South Africa, and Kenya. The SERA-LSA grant is awarded each year to graduate researchers whose projects ‘contribute substantially to advancing the field of economic and social rights.’
He is a co-editor of the blog of the International Association of Constitutional Law and an Assistant Editor for RevDem, a journal of the Democracy Institute at CEU. He is also a co-convenor of the International Association of Constitutional Law Research Group on Social Rights. Gaurav has taught courses at the intersection of law & political science at EBS University, Wiesbaden, CEU, University of Verona, National Law School of India University (NLSIU), Bangalore, India, NALSAR University of Law, Hyderabad, India, and Asian University for Women, Bangladesh.
In 2018, he was awarded the Indian Law Review Early Career Prize. Gaurav has also worked with organizations like the Hungarian Helsinki Committee and the School of Policy & Governance, Azim Premji University, Bangalore.
Center Affiliation: Center for Human Rights and Global Justice
Research Project: Social Welfare Without Social Rights?