Madhav Khosla

Madhav Khosla is the B. R. Ambedkar Professor of Indian Constitutional Law and Professor of Political Science at Columbia University. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, a member of the Columbia University’s Committee on Global Thought, and the Faculty Director of the B.R. Ambedkar Program in Global Constitutionalism at Columbia Law School, which hosts the Ambedkar Law Lectures. Khosla is interested in the nature and form of constitutions, especially from a comparative and theoretical perspective. Much of his research and writing in comparative constitutional law has focused on South Asia and India. Khosla studied political theory at Harvard University, where his dissertation was awarded the Edward M. Chase Prize for “the best dissertation on a subject relating to the promotion of world peace”, and law at Yale Law School and the National Law School of India University, Bangalore. Before joining Columbia Law School, he was a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows.

Khosla’s book India’s Founding Moment: The Constitution of a Most Surprising Democracy (Harvard University Press 2020) was an Economist Best Book of 2020 and co-winner of the Order of the Coif Book Award 2021. His other books include Redefining Comparative Constitutional Law (ed. with Vicki Jackson, Oxford University Press, 2025), The Oxford Handbook of the Indian Constitution (ed. with Sujit Choudhry and Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Oxford University Press 2016), and Unstable Constitutionalism: Law and Politics in South Asia (ed. with Mark Tushnet, Cambridge University Press 2015). In addition, Khosla’s writings have been published in journals such as the American Journal of Comparative Law, Comparative Constitutional Studies, Harvard Law Review, International Journal of Constitutional Law, Journal of Democracy, and Law & Contemporary Problems, in several edited collections, as well as popular forums like the Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, New York Times, and Time. Khosla’s work has been cited by courts in India and Pakistan.