Satya Prasoon is an Assistant Professor of Law at the NALSAR University of Law. His interests and work lie at the intersection of constitutional theory and comparative constitutionalism.
Prasoon’s current writings and research focus on the affective dimensions of constitution-making, the theory of religious minority rights in the constitution, discrimination and structural injustice in democracy, and belief systems and national identity formation through the institutional lens of the Supreme Court in India.
His recent scholarship focuses on a reasoning critique of rights adjudication. In his latest essay, “The Sabarimala Dispute and the Grammar of Religious Freedom: Towards a Theory of Internal Reasoning,” in NUJS Law Review, he advances a theory of internal hermeneutics to argue that courts must engage directly with a religious community’s internal traditions rather than relying on external reference points, as state and religion represent spheres of deep disagreement. In a parallel critique of the anti-discrimination framework published in the Economic & Political Weekly, “Supriyo v. Union of India (2023): Interpretive Failures & the limits of Anti-Discrimination Guarantee in India”, he argues that the denial of marriage equality was a predictable outcome of a jurisprudence bound by the limiting logic of ‘covering,’ highlighting the strategic interpretive failures and evasions within the decision. Expanding this study of constitutional identity into the emotional landscape of the polity, his other recent publication, “A Tragic Photograph: Emotional Journey of a Political Spectator”, in Polemos, uses a photograph of a lynching to critique the academic inattention to cognitive emotions, positioning collective affective responses as vital evaluative judgments that structure a society’s political belief system.
His writings have regularly appeared in a wide variety of popular media, including The Caravan, Deccan Herald, Scroll.in, The Print, and The Wire. He has presented at national and international conferences, and his most recent presentations were on the themes of Hope and Trust in Times of Crisis, American University of Armenia, Armenia; Pathos and Education, University of Barcelona, Spain; the Critical Legal Studies Conference 2024: Speculation(s) at Lund University, Sweden, and the 10th Asian Constitutional Law Forum (ACLF) at the University of Hong Kong, China.
Prasoon teaches core courses on Constitutional Law I & II and elective courses titled ‘Supreme Court in Search of a Nation: A Guide to Rights Protection in India’ and ‘Religious Freedom for Minority Religions and Denominations in India’.
He holds an LL.M. from the University of Melbourne, where he was an Alex Chernov Scholar, and a B.A., LL.B. (Hons.) from West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences (NUJS).
As an undergraduate, he served as an Editor of the Journal of Indian Law and Society (JILS), an Associate Editor of the NUJS Law Review, and the Convenor of the Constitutional Law Society (CLS).
Before coming to NALSAR University of Law, he was an Assistant Professor of Public Law at BML Munjal University (2021-2024) and an Associate Editor with the Supreme Court Observer at Centre for Law and Policy Research (2017-2019)