Professor N. Vasanthi is a senior academic and legal scholar with over twenty-five years of experience in teaching, research, and university administration. Currently, she serves as Registrar and Professor at NALSAR University of Law.
Her expertise includes Constitutional Law, Labour Law, Gender Justice, and Clinical Legal Education. She has led numerous research initiatives, policy consultations, and institutional programs, making significant contributions to legal reform, public education, and comparative constitutional discourse in South Asia.
With an extensive publication record and active participation in national and international collaborations, Professor Vasanthi offers scholarly expertise, institutional leadership, and a strong commitment to inclusive and socially-engaged legal education. Professor Vasanthi’s research has deftly woven intra-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary issues wherein she has examined how discrimination law can benefit from the principles that underlie labour law (e.g., questions of dignity, autonomy, and citizenship), thereby allowing it to move beyond specific acts of discrimination and address more structural and systemic forms of discrimination.
Her contribution to the ‘Annual Survey of State Laws in India’ in 2020 and 2023, published by NALSAR surveyed the areas legislated upon by the Maharashtra state government and the methods it used to exercise this authority. The survey is a shift from a court-focused approach to a legislature-focused one. The 2020 survey, conducted during the pandemic, revealed that the executive dominated the legislature by exercising legislative power through ordinances, which it then transformed into bills. The state legislature passed more ordinances into bills than original bills.
Professor Vasanthi has made notable contributions to e-learning efforts. She has created and managed a Foundational Course (in Telugu) comprising five modules and 32 videos, aimed at educating the public in the local language and covering topics such as Constitutional History, Fundamental Rights, Directive Principles, and Federalism. The Centre for Constitutional Law has developed a short course on the Indian Constitution in Telugu.
For the UGC-MHRD National Mission on Education through ICT (2017–2018), Professor Vasanthi served as the subject expert, scriptwriter, and presenter, and developed e-content on Labour Law aligned with the National Law Curriculum. She was the co-coordinator and the Subject Expert for the ARPIT Online Refresher Course in Law (2019, 2021) under the Madan Mohan Malaviya National Mission on Teaching, Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD). She has led the development of a nationwide law refresher program featuring over 80+ videos, including lectures, expert interviews, and panel discussions, which reached over 5,000 law teachers across India.
Professor Vasanthi specialises in various advisory and consulting roles—serving as a member of the High-Level Committee appointed by the State of Telangana to address sexual harassment issues in the Telugu Film Industry (in 2019); as a member of the Minimum Wage Board for the State of Telangana for three years (2025–2028).
Professor Vasanthi is the lead consultant on a collaborative assignment with the ILO (the International Labour Organisation), conducting an Assessment of Social Protection Access for Care Workers, Including Migrant Care Workers, in Andhra Pradesh, 2026. The assignment will map existing schemes and skilling initiatives for care workers in the state and assess their coverage of migrant workers. A policy brief with recommendations to improve existing social protection schemes and develop new measures to address care needs will be submitted.
As Director of the Centre for Constitutional Law, Policy, and Governance, Professor Vasanthi oversees research in Constitutional Law and Comparative Constitutional Law, as well as their links to public policy. The Centre, recently organised the first edition of the “Dignity Law: Practice and Promise” National Conference” in collaboration with the IJCL and the Access to Justice for Prisoners Project. The stakeholders discussed the global development of dignity and its adaptations in India; the judicial responsibility to protect procedural dignity; critiqued state-centred approaches to dignity rights; and examined dignity as a relational and transformative ethic through clinical legal education.
As the Director of the MK Nambyar SAARC Law Centre for Advanced Legal Studies, she has been involved in on academic research, writing, and debate on issues of Indian constitutional law, comparative constitutional law, and other legal concerns shared by South Asian nations.