Arushi Garg

Please tell us about your academic journey and how you came to study at Oxford.

I read for the BA-LLB (Hons) at Nalsar University, India. I was curious about pursuing a Masters education in an international university to see what else is out there. The plan had always been to complete my Masters and to commence my career as a legal practitioner thereafter. It so happened that the scholarship I secured funded at least two years at Oxford, so I decided to stay on for the MPhil after the BCL. My first year at Oxford had also been a bit chaotic, trying to adjust to a new country, making new friends, and managing the unbelievable workload on the BCL. So, I was also tempted to stay longer to get to know Oxford at hopefully a more relaxed pace, with more control over my time. During the MPhil, after some teething troubles, I realised I really did enjoy immersing myself in research, and decided to apply for admission to the DPhil programme. In some ways, none of it was very well thought through. I was making it up as I went. Thirteen years later, I am very happy I fell into academic research.

Could you tell us the title of your DPhil, the key findings of your research, and its wider implications for law and society?

My DPhil thesis was titled 'Understanding rape adjudication in Delhi trial courts’. The thesis deployed postcolonial feminist theory to analyse factors influencing rape adjudication in Delhi, drawing on the total population of judgments from Delhi's trial courts over 12 months; court observation; and interviews with victims, victim support-persons, lawyers and judges. I found that victims face prejudicial treatment in the criminal justice system when they complain about rape, with gendered biases interacting with institutional classism, disableism and communalism (among other discriminatory attitudes). This pushes victims away from the legal system, and many prosecutions fail when the victim, as the key prosecution witness, refuses to testify in support of the prosecution. In other cases, rape victims might use the threat of a rape conviction to negotiate an outcome that is better aligned with their sense of justice than the retributive criminal justice system is. For example, they might agree to testify in support of the defendant in exchange for housing or employment. However, these negotiations are extra-legal and leave women in rather precarious positions relative to the defendant. In several other instances, acquittals are most directly traceable to discriminatory decision-making by judges. Taken together, my findings reveal the limits of using criminal laws to bring about emancipatory outcomes for women. These limits are certainly related to patriarchal socio-legal cultures. But they are equally related to the legal system’s inability to cater for victims' pressing material concerns, which they might ultimately value over retributive solutions. So, it is important to dismantle the full range of intersecting inequalities in both law and society, and increasing punitiveness in sexual violence laws is unlikely to deliver that.

Have you published any of your findings? If so, where?

I have published some findings on deceptive sex rape cases in India in an article [Social & Legal Studies 28.6 (2019): 737-754], which was also awarded a research prize from the Asian Law and Society Association. However, bulk of my thesis analysis has led to a book manuscript tentatively titled Desire, Discrimination and Decision-making: A Postcolonial Feminist Analysis of Rape Trials (on contract with OUP), which I hope to publish in 2027. Based on my doctoral research, I developed a more general interest in postcolonial criminal justice and law reform, which led to some research on the Indian Penal Code 1837, published in a collection edited by the most excellent Chloë Kennedy and Lindsay Farmer (Leading Works in Criminal Law, Routledge 2023). I have also used my DPhil fieldwork data to reflect on the prosecutor’s role in adversarial criminal justice systems (Asian Journal of Law and Society 11.2 (2024): 152-177). 

What have you been doing since graduating from the DPhil, and what are your next steps? How has your experience of the DPhil prepared you for your chosen career?

Towards the end of my DPhil, I joined the School of Law at the University of Sheffield from 2019 to 2022 as Lecturer (Assistant Professor). Thereafter, I joined the Institute of Criminology at the University of Cambridge where I currently serve as an Associate Professor. The DPhil was transformative for me in so many ways. For one, my supervisors Lucia Zedner and Carolyn Hoyle showed me what it was to be a good, engaged and supportive mentor, and this is something I very much try and put into practice with my own research students. Second, the DPhil experience reinforced the value of interdisciplinary research and provided me with the skills to do this well. Finally, the academic community I found and built in Oxford (and subsequent institutions) has been a huge source of support for me, providing constructive feedback on some occasions, and dark chocolate and gelato on others (and having the wisdom to know the difference).

What are you working on at the moment, and where is your research taking you next?

I am currently working on analysing factors that influence victim support for rape victims in India with two of my brilliant PhD students, Monika and Preeti Dash. We hope to publish this work in the International Handbook of Violence Against Women and Girls edited by Miranda Horvath et al (Routledge 2027). Going forward, I am very keen to explore the ways in which victim support has been reconfigured since I last conducted fieldwork. I am also interested in how the re-codification of criminal laws, including sexual violence laws, in India is affecting institutional attitudes to the criminalisation of deceptive sex in the criminal justice system. I hope to publish this work in a special issue of Criminal Behaviour and Mental Health, edited by Maria Ttofi et al.

How did you find the DPhil programme at Oxford? Were there any particular highlights of your time on the programme?

I really enjoyed the DPhil programme at Oxford! It truly felt like a luxury to be able to make a career out of doing something that brings me so much fulfilment. I did have to patch together funding towards the end of my DPhil, which was stressful, but doing this enabled me to connect with some really interesting and generous colleagues in the Law Faculty, such as Dev Gangjee at St Hilda’s College. Even interacting with my examiners (Prabha Kotiswaran and Jonathan Herring) was a thought provoking, wonderful experience for me. Alongside research and teaching, I benefited hugely from being at Oxford around the time of some powerful student activism, including the Rhodes Must Fall movement, which made me think critically about the education I was receiving.

What advice would you give to prospective applicants looking to apply for the DPhil at Oxford, or to anyone embarking on an independent research project?

Find the people who build you up! Good friends and colleagues will support you in producing your best work, and provide feedback gently but firmly when you need to course correct.

This interview was conducted in October 2026 by Megan Smith-Dobric (DPhil in Law candidate, Wolfson College, Oxford).