SURESH Sabarish
Dr. Sabarish Suresh completed his JSD from the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, New York, where he wrote a thesis on the partition of India and its affect on the making of the Indian Constitution. At NUS Law, he is working on British colonial cartography and its relationship to the development and expansion of the English Common Law in the Indian subcontinent.
Education
JSD, LLM in Comparative Legal Thought (Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law); BBA. LLB (H) (Jindal Global Law School)
Dr. Sabarish Suresh’s doctoral thesis, ‘The Unconscious of the Indian Constitution: Traumatic Histories and Repetitions’, which used a psychoanalytic methodology to examine the role of the partition in the making of the Indian Constitution, won the prestigious 2023 Julien Mezey Dissertation Award, annually awarded by the Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities (LCH) to most promising interdisciplinary dissertations on law. The thesis was also awarded the Jacob Burns Medal by the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. Sabarish has previously taught courses on psychoanalysis and law as a Visiting Faculty at the National Law School of India University, Bangalore.
Sabarish is currently working on a research project which examines how the cartographic operations of the British East India Company and subsequently the British Crown enabled the inauguration of British sovereignty and English Common Law in the Indian subcontinent. An earlier stage of this project was developed at the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory (MPILHLT), Frankfurt, through a postdoctoral scholarship. This project was previously presented at Cambridge University’s Faculty of History, MPILHLT Frankfurt, and the Philipps University, Marburg. In addition to the project on cartography, Sabarish is also working on publishing a monograph titled The Trauma of Constitutions: Indian Partition and the Laws of Repetition, which will be based on his doctoral thesis. By closely examining the cartographic precursor to the making of the Constitution, the pictorial figures in the original ratified copy of the Constitution, and the archival and judicial histories of the provisions on language, federalism, citizenship, and emergency, The Trauma of Constitutions will argue that the Partition of India, the originary scission, has been repressed and disavowed in traditional and contemporary constitutional law scholarship.
- Sabarish Suresh, The Trauma of Constitutions: The Partition of India and the Laws of Repetition (forthcoming).
- Sabarish Suresh, ‘The Cartographic Body in Crisis’ in Ishita Jain, Deepa Ganesh, and Latika Vashist (eds.), Seminar India (special issue on ‘The Body’, April 2023).
- Sabarish Suresh, ‘The Constitutional Memory of Violence’ in Shiv Visvanathan (ed.), Seminar India (special issue on ‘Fables of Violence’, July 2022).
- Sabarish Suresh, ‘Cartographies’ in Peter Goodrich et. al (ed). Research Handbook in Law and Literature (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, March 2022).
- Sabarish Suresh, ‘A Critical Review of Ubuntu: A Comparative Analysis with Kant’s Retributivism’, 4 Journal of Legal Studies and Research 160–172 (2018).
- Legal History,
- Legal Theory,
- Constitutional Law,
- British Cartography,
- Psychoanalytic Jurisprudence