Centre for Legal Philosophy and Justice Education (CLPJE)

The Centre for Legal Philosophy and Justice Education engages with law, justice, and legal education by examining how legal knowledge and pedagogy shape social outcomes. It focuses on inequality and exclusion, working within core areas of legal education to question how law is taught and understood, while also engaging broader questions of justice through interdisciplinary and value-based inquiry.

About

The CLPJE is a research-oriented academic centre dedicated to advancing critical inquiry into legal philosophy, justice, and the role of legal education in shaping institutional and social outcomes.

Philosophy

The Centre works from the premise that law and legal education are not neutral, but actively shape how inequality is understood, organised, and reproduced. It examines how legal doctrines, curricula, and classroom practices make certain forms of exclusion—particularly across caste, gender, disability, sexuality, and class—appear natural or invisible.

The Centre’s work engages directly with this problem within legal education itself. It focuses on how core areas of law are taught, questioning the assumptions built into doctrine, method, and evaluation, and working to reconfigure them so that questions of gender and justice are not treated as marginal or supplementary, but as integral to legal knowledge.

Alongside this, the Centre engages with broader questions of justice by interrogating dominant legal responses to structural crises and exploring alternative frameworks grounded in cooperation, contentment, care, and interdependence.

Our Work

The CLPJE undertakes long-term, theory-driven research that combines doctrinal analysis, philosophical inquiry, and empirical engagement. Its work is anchored in sustained collaborations and is oriented towards producing knowledge that informs legal education, public discourse, and institutional practice.

• Research and Publications
  The Centre has led the Ford Foundation–supported project Knowledge-Based Interventions to Strengthen the Realisation of Socio-Economic Rights, examining how rights to work, education, land, and housing are interpreted and enforced within India’s legal and administrative systems. The project analysed judicial reasoning, institutional practices, and barriers to rights realisation, while also translating research into curricular inputs and practical resources for legal education and justice delivery.
  Additionally, the Centre has also supported faculty, independent, and doctoral research across themes including punishment, legal authority, knowledge democracy, statelessness, immigration, commons-based legal thinking, and gender justice.
• Academic Engagements
  The CLPJE regularly convenes seminars, reading groups, and sustained academic discussions on jurisprudence, legal philosophy, and justice-oriented legal education. These engagements are structured around close reading, dialogue, and critical reflection rather than one-off events.
  The Centre has organised multi-day colloquia, including Cooperation, Contentment and Care to Enable Justice for All, which examined alternative value frameworks for addressing structural crises such as inequality and environmental degradation.
• Pedagogical Initiatives
  Through initiatives such as Making the Invisible Visible in Law Practice and Legal Education (supported by UNFPA), the Centre has worked to integrate gender and justice perspectives across core legal subjects. This includes participatory curriculum reform involving faculty, scholars, and students, as well as national-level symposia on rethinking legal pedagogy.
  In the past, the Centre has also undertaken interdisciplinary initiatives such as the NALSAR Film Festival, using alternative mediums to engage with questions of law, justice, and lived experience.

Collaborations

The Centre has had sustained collaborations with the Ford Foundation and also with UNFPA, alongside engagement with a wide network of academic and research partners.

Contact

Professor Amita Dhanda, Centre Head — amitadhanda@nalsar.ac.in
Padma V.S, Secretary — cdspadma@gmail.com
Afrah Asif, Research Associate — afrah.asif@nalsar.ac.in