Rohit De

History, PhD candidate

Dickinson Hall, Room 129
rohitde@Princeton.EDU

Rohit De is a lawyer and a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at Princeton University. His primary interest is in South Asian legal history and he is particularly interested in studying the courtroom as a space where the relationship between the state and the citizen is mediated. Currently he is working on family law reform in colonial India and the strategies adopted by litigants to maneuver the jurisdictional plurality of the colonial state. He recently presented a paper titled “Mumtaz Bibi’s Broken Heart: The Many Lives of the Dissolution of Muslim Marriages Act, 1939” at the SSRC Conference on Inter-Asia Connections at Dubai. The paper interrogates the public discourses surrounding a radical social legislation which gave South Asian Muslim women rights to divorce that were superior to those enjoyed by Hindu and Christian women in India as well as British women at that time

Rohit graduated with a B.A, LL.B (Hons) degree from the National Law School of India University and completed his LL.M at the Yale Law School in 2006. Before starting at Princeton, Rohit spent a year as the Fox International Fellow at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge University where he worked on a paper comparing the approaches of courts in “secular” democracies” towards minority religions.

Rohit is also interested in comparative constitutional law, particularly how Anglo-American constitutional principles have been reworked by the courts in developing nations. While in law school, Rohit clerked at the Supreme Court of India with Justice K.G Balakrishna, the present Chief Justice of India and worked with the Constitutional Reform project at the International Centre for Ethnic Studies in Colombo.