Dr. Menaka Guruswamy is a Senior Advocate at the Supreme Court of India. Through her litigation practice, she has successfully sought reform of the bureaucracy in the countrythrough fixed tenure, defended federal legislation that mandates that all private schools admit disadvantaged children, and overturned section 377 – the 150-year-old colonial-era law that criminalized consensual same-sex relations.
She has also litigated the case for marriage equality before the Supreme Court of India. In her private law practice, she litigates in the areas of civil law, commercial law, and white-collarcrime. Her white-collar crime defense practice includes the Augusta Westland, 2G Spectrum,and Delhi Excise policy cases.
Dr. Guruswamy was educated at Oxford University, Harvard Law School, and the National Law School of India. She was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and a Gammon Fellow at Harvard.She has been visiting faculty at Yale Law School, Columbia Law School, New York University School of Law, and the University of Toronto Faculty of Law. Dr. Guruswamy has also supported the constitution-making process in Nepal.
She was on Foreign Policy magazine’s list of 100 most influential Global Thinkers for 2019 and along with Arundhati Katju on Times Magazine’s 2019 list of 100 most influential people. She has written widely for publications including the New York Times and the New York Review of Books. She writes a fortnightly column for the Indian Express called ‘Opening Argument’. Dr. Guruswamy is a trustee of the Rhodes Trust, at Oxford University.
