Vidya Kumar

Email: vidya.kumar@le.ac.uk
Telephone: +44 (0)116 373 6262

Personal Details

DPhil in Law (Oxon); LLM (Osgoode Hall Law School, York University, Toronto Ontario Canada); LLB (Queen’s University, Kingston Ontario Canada), MA and BA (Hons) in Political Theory, Barrister and Solicitor, Upper Canada

Dr Kumar joined Leicester in June 2016. Prior to that she was, a Lecturer in Law at Birmingham University, a Visiting Research Fellow at LSE’s Centre for International Studies, and was a postdoctoral Fellow at The Munk School for Global Affairs, University of Toronto. She is currently a Junior Faculty member of the Institute for Global Law and Policy (IGLP), Harvard Law School (USA). She has recently been a Visiting Research Scholar at the Institute of International Law and the Humanities (IILAH) at Melbourne Law School, University of Melbourne, Australia and a Visiting Researcher at the Faculty of Law, Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany.

Research

Dr Kumar’s research is interdisciplinary in nature, traversing the fields of international law, comparative constitutional law, the philosophy of law and legal history.

She is currently working on two related projects,

• a monograph on international law and revolution
• an international collaborative project on revolution, constitutionalism and global justice.

Her publications engage with international law, revolution, international legal history, conceptual history, globalisation theory, Cold War International Law, constitutional law, and international labour human rights law.

Her research and supervision expertise lie in the areas of

• Public International Law (esp International Legal Personality, State Identity and Succession, State Creation, Revolutionaries and Rebels as Non-State Actors)
• Constitutional Theory & Comparative Constitutional Law
• Revolution, Law, and Justice
• International Legal History
• Legal Theory/Philosophy of Law
• Global Legal Studies and Thought
• International Labour Rights & International Human Rights
• TWAIL (Third World Approaches to International Law)
• Law and Development
• Decolonial Law and Theory
• Feminism and Revolution
• International Labour Law and Rights

Teaching

• Constitutional & Administrative Law (Public Law)
• Human Rights in the 21st Century
• Canadian Constitutional Law

Courses previously taught: Public International Law, Public Law (Constitutional & Administrative Law), Advanced Constitutional Law, International Humanitarian Law, Global Law, Philosophy of Law/Legal Theory, International Legal History.

Publications

• Chapter ‘Revolutionaries’ in Fundamental Concepts for International Law: The Construction of a Discipline (eds Sahib Singh and Jean D’Asprémont) Edward Elgar. (2018)
• ‘International Law, Kelsen and the Aberrant Revolution: Excavating the Judicial and Scholarly Practices of Revolutionary Legality in Rhodesia and Beyond’’ in The Power of Legality: Practices of International Law and Their Politics, eds  Nikolas M. Rajkovic, Tanja Aalberts, Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).
• ‘Rethinking the Convergence of Human Rights and Labour Rights in International Law: De-politicisation and Excess’, Osgoode Hall Reader: Law In Transition (Oxford: Hart, 2015). Publishers page
• ‘A Critical Methodology of Globalization: Politics of the 21^st Century?’ (2003) Volume 10, Number 2 (Summer) Indiana J of Global Legal Studies. Online access doi: 10.2979/gls.2003.10.2.87
• ‘A Proleptic Approach to Postcolonial Legal Studies? A Brief Look at the Relationship between Legal Theory and Intellectual History’ (2004) Issue 2003 (2) Law, Social Justice and Global Development (Electronic Law Journal published by Warwick University, UK. Online access
• Voelkerrechtsblog – Symposium on Comparative Constitutionalism  and the Global South held at the Law Faculty of the Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany: “Towards a Constitutionalism of the Wretched” Blog Post. Online Access