Dr Mayur Suresh

Mayur is a Senior Lecturer in Law and has taught at SOAS since 2015. He holds a BA LLB (Hons) from National Law School of India, Bangalore (2004), an LLM from Columbia Law School (2006) and a PhD in law from Birkbeck, University of London (2017).

Prior to commencing his doctoral studies, Mayur practiced law in Delhi, where he and his colleagues represented a wide variety of clients: from women in domestic violence and matrimonial cases, to trade unions in industrial relations proceedings, to property disputes, to criminal defence and anti-terror cases. While most of this work was at the trial court level, Mayur was a part of the legal team - in the Naz Foundation case - that successfully challenged India’s anti-homosexuality law in the Delhi High Court and defended the judgment in the Supreme Court.

Mayur's research is based on ethnographic fieldwork terrorism cases that took place in Delhi’s trial courts. His book Terror Trials: Life and Law in Delhi's Courts (Fordham University Press, 2023) is derived from this research. More broadly, his research seeks to bring an anthropological perspective to the study of legal processes. In 2023 he was awarded the Leverhulme Research Leadership Award for a project titled The Social Life of Law in Authoritarian India. With this award, he will build a research team to do ethnographic and quantitative research into the Indian state's use of law to reconstitute society.

Mayur is also interested in the politics of the Indian judiciary and has co-edited a volume titled The Shifting Scales of Justice: The Supreme Court in Neo-liberal India (OrientBlackswan 2014). He has also published on sexuality and the law in India. He is also interested in writing-based teaching practices and is currently a Fellow at the Centre for Liberal Arts and Science Pedagogies.

• Anti-terror laws and theories of emergency legality (particularly of South Asia)
• Law and anthropology
• Ordinary Language Philosophy
• Sexuality and gender identity in South Asia.