In her private law practice shelitigates in the areas of commercial law and criminal law (especially white-collar cases). Her criminal law defence practice includes cases like Augusta Westland and 2G Spectrum. In her commercial practice she has represented large multinationals and public sector companies. Dr. Guruswamy has a Doctorate in Law (D.Phil) from Oxford University, a Masters in Law (LL.M) from Harvard Law School and a basic law degree from the National Law School of India, Bangalore. She was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and a Gammon Fellow at Harvard Law.
Dr. Guruswamy has been visiting faculty at Yale Law School, New York University School of Law, Columbia Law School and University of Toronto Faculty of Law. At all these schools, she taught courses on comparative constitutional law and post-conflict constitutionalism.
She was on Foreign Policy magazine’s list 100 most influential Global Thinkers for 2019 and with Arundhati Katju on Times Magazine’s 2019 list of 100 most influential people. She has been published in the New York Times, the New York Review of Books and the American Journal of International Law. She writes a fortnightly column called ‘Opening Argument’ in the Indian Express.
Dr. Menaka Guruswamy is a Senior Advocate at the Supreme Court of India. Through her constitutional litigation practice, she has successfully sought reform of the bureaucracy in the country through fixed tenure (TSR Subramanian v Union of India), defended central government legislation that mandates that all private schools admit disadvantaged children (Right to Education case) and overturned section 377 of the Indian Penal Code that criminalised same-sex relations (Navtej Singh Johar v Union of India).
