Gaurav Mukherjee

Visiting Assistant Professor of Law and Stuart F. Smith Teaching Fellow

Gaurav Mukherjee is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Law and the Stuart F. Smith Teaching Fellow at UConn School of Law. He writes about how constitutional law and democratic politics shape the public’s claims to education and housing. Professor Mukherjee’s research examines how the state’s responses to these claims can either support or hinder the conditions that prevent the rise of authoritarianism. He teaches in the areas of American constitutional law, education law, international human rights, and torts at UConn. His current research centers on the constitutional regulation of homelessness in the United States, with comparisons to other jurisdictions. His latest paper, “The New Homelessness,” is forthcoming in the California Law Review and has been cited in an amicus brief for the Pacific Legal Foundation in the Martin v. Grants Pass case before the Supreme Court. His first book, “Access to Social Justice: Effective Remedies for Social Rights,” will be released by Bristol University Press in the Fall, 2024

Professor Mukherjee was previously a Hauser Postdoctoral Global Fellow at NYU Law. He was awarded his SJD in comparative constitutional law from the Central European University in Vienna and spent 2022-23 as a Visiting Doctoral Researcher at NYU Law School. His doctoral work was awarded the Social & Economic Rights Associates – Law & Society Association Dissertation Grant. His doctoral project explored the role of courts as agents of progressive social change, focusing on complex, multi-stage remedies in constitutional litigation and their interaction with structural constitutional principles like the separation of powers and democratic legitimacy.

Professor Mukherjee has held visiting fellowships at the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights at the University of Oxford, the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law in Heidelberg, and the University of Melbourne. In 2021, he was a Social Rights Research Fellow for the University of Stirling’s Nuffield Foundation-funded project on Access to Justice for Social Rights. His writings have appeared in leading international journals and edited volumes, including the California Law Review, Oxford Handbook of Economic, Social & Cultural Rights, the International Journal of Constitutional Law, the American Journal of International Law, and the South African Journal on Human Rights, and the Oxford Handbook of Comparative Human Rights Law. He co-edits the blog of the International Association of Constitutional Law and is an Assistant Editor for RevDem, a journal of the Democracy Institute at CEU. He co-convenes the International Association of Constitutional Law Research Group on Social Rights. He has taught courses at NYU Law, Central European University, the University of Verona, the National Law School of India University in Bangalore, the NALSAR University of Law in Hyderabad, and the Asian University for Women in Bangladesh. In 2018, Professor Mukherjee received the Indian Law Review Early Career Prize. He also has extensive experience in legal practice, having represented various civil society organizations in strategic litigation on constitutional educational rights. He maintains strong links with civil society organizations that work on issues relating to educational equity and school financing. He is also the Co-Chair of the Academic Committee of the Asian American Bar Association of New York.