Citizenship and Human Rights in India

Olivia Rosen is a summer associate at Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer in NYC. At Cornell, she serves as an editor of Cornell’s International Law Journal and interns for the Cornell India Law Center.

Prachee Sawant is a rising third-year candidate for Juris Doctor at Cornell Law School. She is an editor for Cornell International Law Journal as well as the Legal Information Institute. Prachee is actively involved with the Cornell India Law Center. She is interested in international human rights, focusing on issues related to child rights and education. She is a part of the International Human Rights Clinic and conducted fieldwork in Assam, India, this spring.

Professor Sital Kalantry is a Clinical Professor of Law and the Director of Online Education at Cornell Law School, as well as the Faculty Director of the MSLS Program and the Cornell India Law Center. She is an expert in the fields of comparative law, international human rights law, and the study of judicial systems. She teaches contract law, business and human rights, and comparative constitutional law.

She has spent nearly two decades working to promote international human rights in the United States and abroad by filing and arguing cases in international courts and domestic courts in Colombia, India, and other countries, authoring impactful human rights reports on gender rights and immigrants’ rights, and developing training materials for judges on human rights.

She has published widely, including a book, dozens of articles, and many book chapters. Her works have appeared in the UCLA Law Review online, North Carolina Law Review, Stanford Journal of International Law, Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, Human Rights Quarterly, and a number of other peer-reviewed journals and university presses. Her opinion pieces have been published in the New York Times, Slate, the New York Daily News, and in other publications. She has been invited to deliver numerous talks and presentations around the world.

She received a Fulbright-Nehru Research Scholar grant to conduct research on the Indian Supreme Court as well as several other awards and grants for her work. She is a regular media commentator on reproductive rights, human rights, surrogacy, and immigration. She serves as referee for a human rights journal and an academic press. She is on the editorial board of several law journals in India.

Professor Kalantry received her A.B. from Cornell University in 1994, an MSc from the London School of Economics in 1995 and her J.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1998.

Sumridhi Kaur graduated from Cornell Law School in May 2020 with a Juris Doctor degree, specializing in the field of international legal affairs. In her third year of law school, she conducted fieldwork in Assam, India, as part of the International Human Rights Policy Advocacy Clinic. Specifically, Sumridhi attended a two-day conference of lawyers, academicians, and civil society advocates who are experts on the question of statelessness in India and the right to have rights. She also spent several days interviewing Assamese residents whose Indian citizenship was either questioned or completely stripped away by the Indian State.