GAUTAM BHATIA graduated from the National Law School of India University. He has BCL and MPhil degrees from the University of Oxford and an LLM from Yale Law School. At Oxford, he won the Herbert Hart Prize for the best essay on jurisprudence and political theory, and his essay on the jurisprudence of Ronald Dworkin was published in the Australian Journal of Legal Philosophy. His essays have appeared in the Oxford Handbook for the Indian Constitution, Max Planck Encyclopedia of Comparative Constitutional Law, and in journals such as Constellations and Global Constitutionalism. He has published three books—Offend, Shock, or Disturb: Freedom of Speech Under the Indian Constitution, The Transformative Constitution: A Radical Biography in Nine Acts, and a novel, The Wall.
As a lawyer, he has been part of legal teams involved in contemporary constitutional cases such as the challenge to criminal defamation, the nine-judge bench right to privacy case, the Section 377 challenge, and the Aadhaar challenge. His work has been cited thrice by the Indian Supreme Court, and once by the High Court of Kerala. He founded and writes the Indian Constitutional Law and Philosophy Blog (http://indconlawphil.wordpress.com).