Jhuma Sen

Advocate, Calcutta High Court and Supreme Court

Jhuma Sen is a lawyer, academic and policy consultant based out of Delhi and Kolkata. She graduated from Symbiosis Law School, Pune in 2008, and later read for an LL.M at University of California at Berkeley as an American Association of University Women’s International Fellow. She joined the Chambers of Ms. Indira Jaising (Senior Advocate, Supreme Court of India and former Additional Solicitor General) before independently practicing before the Supreme Court, Delhi High Court and various Tribunals, appearing in a range of matters, from constitutional writ to civil, labour and employment and matrimonial disputes. 

Jhuma has been a Professor of Law at Jindal Global Law School (JGLS), India and is currently an Adjunct Faculty at the National University of Juridical Sciences, Kolkata. She has also been a Visiting Faculty at the National Law School of India University, Bangalore and a Visiting/Research Fellow at Institute for Feminist Legal Studies, Osgoode Hall Law School (Canada), Oñati International Institute for the Sociology of Law (Spain), Cornell Law School (USA), Erik Castren Institute (Finland), National University of Singapore (Singapore). 

In 2019, Jhuma received the Future of Change India Research Fellowship at University of New South Wales (2019) where she spent a term researching and writing on religious personal laws in the making of constitutional culture in India. The said research is part of her forthcoming book (tentatively titled Courting Family: Public Life of Private Laws) on the everyday life of “family law” in constituting public culture. Jhuma was an Asia 21 Young Leader in 2017 under the aegis of the Asia Society. In 2019, Jhuma was also offered the prestigious Eleanor Roosevelt Fellowship at the Human Rights Program in Harvard Law School (declined). 

Jhuma has been a part of the Justice Verma Committee deliberations and has engaged with the National Human Rights Commission, National Commission for Women, the Law Commission of India, National Judicial Academy and the Supreme Court on several issues relating to access to justice, gender justice and the like. 

Jhuma’s research and practice interests intersect and include human rights, gender justice, and anti-discrimination law. Jhuma is a Convenor of the Indian Feminist Judgments Project, a project that situates writing alternative judgments to judgments that could have been written better or written differently by using a feminist lens. The first compendium of such rewritten judicial opinions has been published by Indian Law Review in 2021 as a Special Issue (Vol 5, 2021). 

Her current research has two broad themes, the first is the interface of technology, gender and law, where she tries to probe legal regulation of digital networked environments through a gendered lens; and the second, is the mapping of citizenship regimes in South Asia historically, legally and juridically.

Her book Breaking the Bar: Early Women Lawyers and the Legal Profession in India under contract with Pan Macmillan is scheduled to be published in 2022.  

Her opinion pieces have been published by the Indian Express, Economic Times, Wire, Mint, Caravan and Outlook among others.