Arundhati Katju is a lawyer practicing in Indian trial and appellate courts. Her work encompasses a broad array of practice areas, including white-collar defense, civil and commercial litigation. In 2018, Arundhati successfully represented the lead petitioners in the Indian Supreme Court’s historic judgment in Navtej Singh Johar and Others v Union of India, where the Court struck down India’s 157-year-old sodomy law and upheld the rights of LGBT Indians to equality and dignity. She also argued before the Indian Supreme Court for marriage equality in 2023.
Arundhati was awarded the University of Virginia’s highest honor, the Jefferson Medal in Law, in 2023. In 2019, she was named one of TIME Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People of the Year, Queerty Pride50, and Fast Company’s 100 Most Creative People in Business. She has also received the 2019 APCOM Hero Social Justice Award and is a member of the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry’s Task Force on Diversity and Inclusion.
Heading her own law offices since 2011, Arundhati has a robust white-collar defense and commercial litigation practice. She regularly acts as a barrister for leading Indian law firms, having represented clients from India, Germany, Singapore, and the US in corruption and defense procurement cases.
She has advised India’s leading public university, prosecuted pollution complaints on behalf of the State pollution regulator, and been appointed amicus curiae to assist the Delhi High Court on numerous occasions.
Arundhati is also a public defender with the Delhi High Court Legal Services Committee, India’s top legal aid program. In this role, she has argued more than 100 appellate cases before the Delhi High Court.
Arundhati holds a BA LLB (Hons.) degree from the National Law School of India University, and an LLM from Columbia Law School, where she was a Human Rights Fellow, James Kent Scholar, Public Interest Honoree, and Herman N. Finkelstein Memorial Fellow. She was awarded the CLAGS Duberman-Zal Fellowship, 2019-20, and was a Senior Fellow at Columbia University’s Center for Contemporary Critical Thought, 2019-2021.
She has taught white-collar crime law at the National Law University, Delhi, and worked with India’s National Commission for Protection of Child Rights to draft the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, of 2012. Her work has been published in the Indian Express, Times of India, Scroll.in, and ConstitutionNet.org. She has spoken at the Oxford Union and the United Nations, and given a TEDx talk about the Johar case.
