The Infosys Prize 2026 in Humanities and Social Sciences is awarded to Prof. Gautam Bhatia. Prof. Bhatia is an outstanding young legal scholar, prodigiously productive, tremendously wide in his range of knowledge and interests, with a real gift for marshalling arguments rigorously towards conclusions that seek to make the law an instrument for constructing a fair, equal, and humane society. His five books and many academic articles amount to a formidable corpus of important work, fully deserving of the prestige bestowed by the Infosys Prize.
Scope and Impact of Work
Prof. Gautam Bhatia’s work in the study of the law is a model of rigorous argument drawing on a variety of ideas in a rich literature in legal thought, political theory, and moral philosophy, which he has mastered in great detail. Prof. Bhatia fruitfully relates issues in the law to questions of political economy and to the normative ideals of equality and fairness, marshaling carefully constructed arguments to find possibilities in the law for constructing a humane social order.
Bhatia’s first book, Offend, Shock, Or Disturb: Free Speech Under the Indian Constitution, effectively resolves tensions between liberal and paternalistic elements in the Indian constitution on the matter of free speech, offering a reconceptualization of free speech that is more coherent and convincing.
His second book, The Transformative Constitution: A Radical Biography in Nine Acts, even more ambitiously seeks to address and overcome with shrewd and effective analysis an even deeper contradiction in the constitution between, on the one hand, the goal of seeking to limit the powers of the state adopted in independent India, which had inherited many of the features of the colonial apparatus of rule and, on the other hand, steering the state to transform Indian society so that its citizens can partake more equitably in the basic goods and necessities of life.
A third work, Horizontal Rights: An Institutional Approach, begins with the acknowledgement that not just the state but private power can and does infringe on constitutional values, and proceeds with great acuity to construct societal markers which constitute what he calls ‘institutions’ that provide a theoretical framework for assigning—in the name of the constitution—duties and responsibilities both to the state and to private actors.
No other legal scholar in the Indian academy today has worked with such ceaseless passion and such energy and brilliance to criticize and improve upon the frameworks that define and frame the law in our country today.
Bio
Gautam Bhatia went to Balliol College as a Rhodes Scholar after obtaining a bachelor’s degree in the arts and in the law from the National Law School of India University in Bengaluru. After acquiring his second bachelor’s degree in law from Oxford, he proceeded to Yale University for a master’s degree and then returned to Oxford to acquire a doctoral degree.
Prof. Bhatia is the author of five books on Indian Law and the Indian Constitution and has also written extensively on constitutional law in other parts of the world. He is currently an Adjunct Professor at the Jindal Global Law School and a practicing lawyer in New Delhi.
Gautam Bhatia also has a lively and thriving secondary career as a novelist and writer of science fiction.
Timeline
Jury Citation
Prof. Gautam Bhatia is the most dynamic legal scholar of the present generation, combining great intelligence, detailed knowledge of the issues surrounding India’s constitution—but extending as well to the constitutions of many different parts of the world (from Japan and Kenya to the Caribbean, to name only a few)—and an impressive mastery of the scholarly literature not just in the law but in the neighboring disciplines that have an impact on the law, such as macro-economics, sociology, political theory, and moral philosophy.
Prof. Bhatia’s enormous scholarly output, maintaining uniformly very high standards through each of his five books at so early an age, promises a remarkably brilliant future ahead and we have full expectation that the Infosys Prize for the Humanities and Social Sciences will encourage him to make even deeper and greater contributions to his subject.
Gautam Bhatia
My warmest congratulations to Gautam Bhatia on being awarded the Infosys Prize 2026 in Humanities and Social Sciences for his outstanding and prolific contributions to the theoretical construction of possibilities for revising and improving the legal and constitutional frameworks in India so as to provide a basis for a more humane and equitable society.
