Photo by Jack Devlin

Rohit De

Rohit De's picture
Associate Professor of History
Address: 
320 York St, New Haven, CT 06511-3627
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Rohit De is a historian of modern South Asia and is particularly interested in legal history. He received his Ph.D from Princeton University, where he was elected to the Society of Woodrow Wilson Scholars. His dissertation won the Law and Society Association Prize in 2013. He was the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for History and Economics and at Trinity Hall at the University of Cambridge before coming to Yale in 2014.  Rohit De received his law degrees from the Yale Law School and the National Law School of India University, Bangalore.
 
Rohit recently published A People’s Constitution: The Everyday Life of Law in the Indian Republic, which explores how the Indian constitution, despite its elite authorship and alien antecedents, came to permeate everyday life and imagination in India during its transition from a colonial state to a democratic republic. Mapping the use and appropriation of constitutional language and procedure by diverse groups such as butchers and sex workers, street vendors and petty businessmen, journalists and women social workers, it offers a constitutional history from below.
 
His other research projects include charting how constitutional ideas circulated through postcolonial nations of Asia and Africa, the emergence of the idea of an economic crime in India and investigating the impact of the partition of the Indian subcontinent on property regimes in India and Pakistan.
 
Rohit is also interested in comparative constitutional law. He has assisted Chief Justice K.G. Balakrishnan of the Supreme Court of India and worked on constitution reform projects in Nepal and Sri Lanka. He is an Associate Research Scholar in Law at the Yale Law School and the co-curator of the History and the Law digital archive. (http://www.histecon.magd.cam.ac.uk/history-law/index.html)
 
Rohit De teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in South Asian history; postcolonial histories of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh; on Indian constitutional culture and political thought, as well as courses on global legal history, law and colonialism and law and society.