About me

Gaurav Mukherjee

I study how constitutional law regulates positive rights—such as housing and education—and how these rights are reshaped when they collide with claims of religious liberty. My work focuses on the legal and institutional pressures that arise when courts are asked to mediate between state obligations to provide public goods and demands for religious exemption, delegation, or autonomy. I treat judicial remedies as a key site where these tensions are resolved, and where courts define the limits of state responsibility, redraw public-private boundaries, and respond to broader democratic stress. Methodologically, my work takes a sociolegal approach, treating doctrinal change as reflecting shifts in the relationship between courts and the political branches, shaped by what Charles Epp calls “support structures”: the legal organizations, advocacy networks, and political alignments that sustain rights-based litigation and influence judicial responsiveness.

I am a Visiting Assistant Professor of Law and the Stuart F. Smith Teaching Fellow at the University of Connecticut School of Law from Fall 2024. I was previously a Hauser Postdoctoral Global Fellow at NYU Law.

I hold an SJD in comparative constitutional law from the Central European University, Vienna (CEU). I spent 2022-23 as a Visiting Doctoral Researcher at the NYU Law School. My doctoral work won a Social & Economic Rights Associates (SERA)-Law & Society Association (LSA) Dissertation Grant to support my research and writing. The SERA-LSA grant is awarded each year to graduate researchers whose projects will ‘contribute substantially to advancing the field of economic and social rights.’

My current research focuses on how constitutional law structures relationships between the state and private institutions, particularly in areas where public and private governance overlap. I examine how funding restrictions in US state constitutions, the state action doctrine, and broader public law principles operate in settings dominated by private actors, such as private and religious actors in public education and social welfare. My latest paper, “Private Disestablishment,” forthcoming in the BYU Law Review, explores how governments facilitate religious governance in spaces that are ostensibly secular, reshaping the legal boundaries of public and private authority.

I have also studied the constitutional regulation of homelessness in the United States and beyond. My paper, “The New Homelessness“ (co-authored with Mila Versteeg & Kevin Cope), published in the California Law Review in Spring ’25, was cited in an amicus brief for the Pacific Legal Foundation in Martin v. Grants Pass, the case which overturned the Ninth Circuit’s ban on the enforcement of anti-homeless city ordinances on the ground that it violated the Eighth Amendment to the US Constitution.

My doctoral project examined the contested role of courts as agents of progressive social transformation. My work explained the increasing role of complex, multi-stage remedies in constitutional litigation, and the ways that it interacts with the separation of powers and principles of democratic legitimacy.

Previously, I have held visiting fellowships at the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights at the University of Oxford, the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law, Heidelberg, and the University of Melbourne. In 2021, I was a Social Rights Research Fellow as part of the University of Stirling’s Nuffield Foundation funded project on Access to Justice for Social Rights: Addressing the Accountability Gap. The findings of the project shed light on the myriad ways claimants are denied access to social benefits and entitlements in the UK.

My writing has appeared or is forthcoming in the BYU Law Review, the California Law Review, Oxford Handbook of Economic, Social & Cultural Rights, the International Journal of Constitutional Law, the American Journal of International Law, South African Journal on Human Rights, the Indian Law Review, the University of Oxford Human Rights Hub Journal, Verfassungs und Recht in Übersee, the Oxford Handbook on Comparative Human Rights.

I co-edit the blog of the International Association of Constitutional Law and am an Assistant Editor for RevDem, a journal of the Democracy Institute at CEU. I am a co-convenor of the International Association of Constitutional Law Research Group on Social Rights. I’ve taught or assisted in teaching courses at the intersection of law & political science at UConn, NYU Law, CEU, University of Verona, National Law School of India University (NLSIU), Bangalore, India, NALSAR University of Law, Hydearabad, India, and Asian University for Women, Bangladesh.

In 2018, I was awarded the Indian Law Review Early Career Prize. I have worked with organizations like the Hungarian Helsinki Committee and the School of Policy & Governance, Azim Premji University, Bangalore. Between 2012 and 2014, I worked as an associate in the transactional practice of a premier multinational law firm. I have also represented clients before the Supreme Court of India in education law and constitutional litigation.