Sabarish Suresh
Visiting Assistant Professor of Legal Studies
Affiliation: Visiting
Education: JSD, LLM (Comparative Legal Thought) Benjamin N Cardozo School of Law; BBA LLB (H) Jindal Global Law School
Research Areas: Legal History; Constitutional Law; Criminal Law; Legal Theory; Law and Literature
Sabarish Suresh researches in the fields of constitutional law, criminal law, legal history, and law and humanities. He 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 effect on the making of the Indian Constitution.
Suresh is currently working on a book, tentatively titled Cartojuridism: Law, Cartography, and Jurisdiction in Colonial India, which will present a historical examination of how cartography and law were intricately linked in colonial India. By analyzing eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth-century British cartographic practices in India, the book will argue that maps were crucial artefacts for the entrenchment of British sovereignty and paved the way for diverse forms of colonial jurisdictional rationalities. Through a detailed analysis of the diverse ways in which maps were put to legal use in the colony, Cartojuridism aims to provide a novel understanding of a predominantly unexplored history of maps, law, and colonialism in the Indian subcontinent. In addition to the book project on cartography, Sabarish is working on another book, titled The Trauma of the Indian Constitution: Partition and Repetition, forthcoming with the Edinburgh University Press. 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 the Indian Constitution will argue that the Partition of India, the originary scission, has been repressed and disavowed in traditional and contemporary constitutional law scholarship.
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. He has previously held the NUS Law Laureate Fellowship (2023-25) at the National University of Singapore, a Visiting Postdoctoral Scholarship (2023) at the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory, and has taught courses on psychoanalysis and law as a Visiting Faculty (2020-21) at the National Law School of India University, Bangalore.