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Tarun Khaitan is a lecturer and fellow at Wadham College. He is one of the faculty members on the Executive Committee of the Oxford Pro Bono Publico. He completed his undergraduate studies (BA LLB Hons) at the National Law School (Bangalore) between 1999-2004. He then came to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and completed his postgraduate studies (BCL with distinction, MPhil with distinction, DPhil) at Exeter College. Before joining Wadham, he was the Penningtons Student in Law at Christ Church.
Tarun is currently working on a monograph entitled 'Autonomy, Discrimination and the Law'.
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T Khaitan, 'Beyond Reasonableness: A Rigorous Standard of Review' (2008) 50 Journal of Indian Law Institute 177
T Khaitan, 'Dignity as an Expressive Norm: Neither Vacuous nor a Panacea' (2012) 32 Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 1 [...]
DOI: 10.1093/ojls/gqr024
Proponents of dignity see it as a useful tool which solves the most important (if not all) of the practical and theoretical problems in human rights law. Arguing against this sympathetic position on the other side of the debate are the sceptics, who have raised troubling questions about dignity’s alleged indeterminacy, as well as about the illiberal role that it has allegedly played in certain contexts. In this paper, I argue that designing a defensible and useful conception of dignity which is distinguishable from other values such as equality and autonomy may be possible, but not without addressing some genuine infirmities that the critics have pointed out. If there is indeed such a conception of dignity, it is likely to be "expressive" in character. I therefore argue that the legal ideal of dignity is best understood as an expressive norm: whether an act disrespects someone’s dignity depends on the meaning that such act expresses, rather than its consequences or any other attribute of that act.
T Khaitan, 'Prelude to a Theory of Discrimination Law' in Deborah Hellman & Sophia Moreau (eds), Philosophical Foundations of Discrimination Law ( 2013) (forthcoming)
T Khaitan, 'Reading Swaraj into Article 15: A New Deal for all Minorities' (2009) 2 NUJS Law Review 419
T Khaitan, 'Reforming the Pre-Legislative Process' (2011) Economic and Political Weekly 27
V Bogdanor, S Vogenauer and T Khaitan, 'Should Britain Have a Written Constitution?' (2007) 78 Political Quarterly 499
T Khaitan, 'The constitution as a statutory term' (2014) Law Quarterly Review (forthcoming)
T Khaitan, 'The Real Price of Parliamentary Obstruction' (2013) 642 Seminar 37
T Khaitan, 'Transcending Reservations: A Paradigm Shift in the Debate on Equality' (2008) Economic and Political Weekly 8
Teaching: Constitutional and Administrative Law; Human Rights Law; Philosophy of Law
Research: Public Law, Human Rights Law, Philosophy of Law, Discrimination Law
