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Dr Shailesh Kumar

Shailesh

Lecturer in Law, Royal Holloway, University of London, United Kingdom

Email: shailesh.kumar@rhul.ac.uk

Profile

Shailesh Kumar is an interdisciplinary socio-legal researcher, a criminologist, and an ethnographer working as a Lecturer in Law at the Department of Law & Criminology. Before joining Royal Holloway, Shailesh was a Lecturer at the University of East London, where he convened and taught the modules of Criminal Law, Criminal Justice Process, Policing and Criminal Investigation, and Race, Ethnicity, Crime and Justice to undergraduate law and criminology students. He also had a short stint at SOAS as a Teaching Fellow of Criminal Law, and as an Associate Tutor at Birkbeck, University of London, where he completed his PhD as a Commonwealth Scholar funded by the UK government. He is a co-convenor of the Law and Emotion Collaborative Research Network of the Law and Society Association (USA), a Book Review Editor of Hedgehogs and Foxes (a Law and Humanities Blog), and sits on the Editorial Board of Project39A's Criminal Law Blog.

Research

Publications

  • Kumar, Shailesh (2023) 'How to Decolonise Legal Knowledge for All?' Frontiers of Socio-Legal Studies, University of Oxford.
  • Kumar, Shailesh (2022) ‘Child Sexual Abuse Cases in India and Judicial Officers' Perceptions and Experiences of POCSO-related Special Training.’ Socio-legal Review 18 (2), pp. 264-300. ISSN: 0973-5216.
  • Arvind Kumar and Shailesh Kumar (2022) 'SC's NEET Judgment Has Five Messages For Anti-Reservationists In India', LiveLaw.in.
  • Lucas H.M. da Conceição and Shailesh Kumar (2021) 'Digital Constitutionalism and the Right to Protest Online – A Political Perspective of Digital Dissent from India’s experience with Content Moderation', International Journal of Constitutional Law Blog.
  • Kumar, Shailesh (2021) ‘The Rebirth of Delinquent ‘Adult-Children’: Criminal Capacity, Socio-Economic Systems and the Malleability of Penality of Child Delinquency in India’, in Alexandra Cox and Laura S. Abrams (eds) The Palgrave International Handbook of Youth Imprisonment, pp. 107-139, Palgrave Macmillan. eBook ISBN 978-3-030-68759-5.
  • Kumar, Shailesh (2021) ‘Thinking Beyond Penal Reform in India: Questioning the Logic of Colonial Punishments’, in Michael J. Coyle and David Scott (eds) The Routledge International Handbook of Penal Abolitionism, pp. 258-268, Routledge, Taylor and Francis: Oxon and New York. ISBN 9781138354098.
  • Kumar, Shailesh (2019) ‘Shifting Epistemology of Juvenile Justice in India.’ Contexto Internacional (Special Issue: Gender in the Global South) 41 (1) (Jan/Apr), pp. 113-140. eISSN 1982-0240.
  • Kumar, Shailesh (2017) ‘Interpreting the Scales of Justice: Legal Architecture, Symbolism and Semiotics of the Supreme Court of India.’ International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique 30 (4), pp. 637–675. eISSN 1572-8722.
  • Kumar, Shailesh (2017) ‘Justice V.R. Krishna Iyer and Expansive Interpretation of Fundamental Rights’, in Azim B. Pathan and Deepak Kumar Srivastava (eds) Human Rights, Constitutionalism and Rule of Law: Contemporary Issues and Challenges, pp. 81-97, Satyam Law International: New Delhi. ISBN 9789382823551.
  • Kumar, Shailesh (2017) ‘Environmental Governance, Indian Constitutional Framework, and the Dilemma of Public Trust Doctrine.’ Journal of the Campus Law Centre [University of Delhi] 5, ISSN 2321-4716.
  • Kumar, Shailesh and Aklavya Anand (2017) ‘Public Domain of Personal Laws: An inquiry from the Perspectives of Conflict of Interests and Identities.’ Journal of Law and Public Policy (Special Issue- Uniform Civil Code) 4, pp. 124-143. ISSN 2350-1200.
  • Kumar, Shailesh (2016) ‘Breaking the Shackles- Sexuality, Freedom and Judicial Recognition to Live-in-Relationships.’ Journal of Law and Social Sciences 3, pp. 1-15. ISSN 2347-839X.

Expertise

Shailesh has a strong developing track record in interdisciplinary research and publication in the areas of child sexual abuse, access to justice, youth justice, penal and prison abolition, court ethnography, law and visual culture, legal pluralism, and law and society in South Asia. He has extensive experience in using qualitative research methods. Shailesh has published several journal articles and has contributed chapters in International Handbooks. He writes on caste, gender, race, and their intersection with discrimination, violence, and law. More broadly, he is interested in the anthropological and sociological study of law, legal institutions, legal actors, and legal cultures, and the roles played by emotion, power, and intersectionality across these entities in how laws are enacted and implemented. He is also interested in the interdisciplinary study of law and the humanities.
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