Prabha Kotiswaran
Law
Kings College London
United Kingdom
Biography
Dr Prabha Kotiswaran joined King’s in September 2012 where she is Senior Lecturer in Criminal Law. She previously taught at SOAS. She received her undergraduate law degree in India from the National Law School of India University, Bangalore and then an LLM and SJD (doctorate) from Harvard Law School. She also practiced law for four years at the New York law firm of Debevoise and Plimpton. Dr Prabha Kotiswaran joined King’s in September 2012 where she is Senior Lecturer in Criminal Law. She previously taught at SOAS. She received her undergraduate law degree in India from the National Law School of India University, Bangalore and then an LLM and SJD (doctorate) from Harvard Law School. She also practiced law for four years at the New York law firm of Debevoise and Plimpton.
Research Interest
"Dr Kotiswaran’s main areas of research include criminal law, feminist legal theory and sociology of law. She is the author of Dangerous Sex, Invisible Labor: Sex Work and the Law in India, published by Princeton University Press (2011) and co-published by Oxford University Press, India (2011). Dangerous Sex, Invisible Labor won the SLSA-Hart Book Prize for Early Career Academics and has been reviewed by British Journal of Criminology, Harvard Journal of Law & Gender, Political and Legal Anthropology, Biblio, Indian Journal of Gender Studies, ForeWord Reviews, The Times Higher Education Supplement, Book Review Literary Trust, The Telegraph (India), and Rights At Work, and featured on The Page 99 test and BBC Radio 4 show Thinking Allowed. She has also edited a reader on Sex Work published by Women Unlimited (2011) for a Series on Issues in Contemporary Indian Feminism. This work was funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council. Dr Kotiswaran has authored a critique of contemporary anti-trafficking law and a book-length work analyzing the legal regulation of markets in social reproduction from a feminist perspective. She has also collaborated with Amanda Perry-Kessaris and Diamond Ashiagbor on a project on an economic sociology of law (ESL), convening a reading group and editing two special journal issues on ESL based on papers presented at a workshop held at SOAS in September 2012. In addition she is Senior Editor for Oxford Handbooks in Law Online, and on the Editorial Boards of the Canadian Journal of Law and Society and the Jindal Global Law Review, and is a founding member of the Open Democracy Blog Beyond Slavery and Trafficking with recent contributions on ‘The Gendered Victims of (Anti-Trafficking)’ with Samuel Okyere. She is also on the Advisory Board of Work in Freedom, an ILO-DFID anti-trafficking initiative. She was Co-Convener (with Peer Zumbansen) of the Transnational Law Summer Institute (TLSI) held in June 2015 and June 2016 and has previously been quoted on the CTV News Video Network (13th September 2013)."
