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Ph.D. Mathew John

Jindal Global Law School, Delhi (India)

Curriculum Vitae

Ph.D. Mathew John gained his Bachelor of Law at the National School of Law of India University in 1998 and his Master of Law (LL.M.) at the University of Warwick in 2003. In 2012 he received his Ph.D. at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Since 2012 Mathew John has been working as an Associate Professor at the Jindal Global Law School Sonipat where he offered courses in Constitutional Law, Administrative Law, Environment Law, Indian Constitutionalism and Urban Local Government.

Mathew John was Fellow at the Käte Hamburger Center "Law as Culture" from January to September 2017.

Research Project

Social Intuitions in the Shadow of Liberal Constitutionalism: Modernity, Politics and State Formation in Contemporary India

As an important theatre of modern politics ‘Constitutions’ are also the ground to observe and understand the modularity, particularity and normativity of modern political and legal forms.  In exploring these issues the intellectual framework of political liberalism has cast a long shadow on the manner in which constitutionalism has been conceived and practiced in a large part of the modern world especially those parts that that came under the influence of Euro-American forms of government.
In most liberal constitutional contexts, including India, this is a question that has been answered by tying constitutional authority to being representative of the demos or the ‘people’. Accordingly this project seeks to interrogate the manner in which Indian constitutionalism produced its community even as it has sought to manage the social excess that this project has been unable to manage. It is this conversation between law, society and modern politics that this project will seek to explore and clarify.

Publications (selected)

  • “The Limits of Pluralism: A Perspective on Religious Freedom in Indian Constitutional Law”, (Paper Presented at the Institute for Religion Culture and Public Life, Columbia University, 2016)
  • ‘Social Intuitions in the Shadow of Liberal Constitutionalism: A Perspective from Indian Constitutional Law’, in Michael Dowdle and Michael Wilkinson (ed) Constitutionalism Beyond Liberalism (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2017).
  • “A Nation of Minorities: Conceptions of Community in the Indian Constitution” Jus Politicum, Forthcoming 2017)
  • “Identity and the Social Revolution: On the Political Sociology of Constitutionalism in Contemporary India”, (Working Paper Series, Centre for Law and Governance, JNU, 2012)
  • “Indian Exceptionalism? India's Experiment with Constitutional Secularism” in N. Sudarshan ed., Religious Freedom and Secularism – Theory and Practice, (Hyderabad: ICFAI University Press, 2008)
  • “Decoding Secularism: A comparative study of legal decisions in India and the United States”, Economic and Political Weekly, Volume 40, Number 18, (April 30- May 6,  2005), 1901-1906
  • “Interpreting the Narmada Judgment” Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 36, No. 32 (Aug. 11-17, 2001), pp. 3030-3034