Gaurav Mukherjee

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

Education/Professional Certification

SJD, Central European University
LLM, Central European University
BA-LLB, NALSAR University of Law, India

Biography

Gaurav Mukherjee is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Law and the Stuart F. Smith Teaching Fellow at the University of Connecticut School of Law.

Professor Mukherjee studies how constitutional law regulates positive rights—such as housing and education—and how these rights are reshaped when they collide with demands for accommodation by religious organizations and private entities. His work explores how legal and institutional processes mediate tensions between state obligations to provide public goods and claims to autonomy, delegation, or exemption.

Professor Mukherjee’s current scholarship examines how constitutional law structures relationships between the state and private institutions by analyzing how state constitutional funding restrictions, the state action doctrine, and broader public law principles apply in domains—such as education and social welfare—where public functions are increasingly carried out by private and religious actors. His paper “Private Disestablishment,” forthcoming in the BYU Law Review, investigates how governments facilitate religious governance in ostensibly secular spaces by strategically exploiting gaps in the state action doctrine. His most recent published work, The New Homelessness (California Law Review, 2025), analyzes the constitutional regulation of homelessness in the United States and has been cited in an amicus brief before the Supreme Court in Grants Pass v. Johnson.

He is the author of Access to Social Justice: Effective Remedies for Social Rights (Bristol University Press, 2024), and his writing has appeared or is forthcoming in the California Law Review, BYU Law Review, Oxford Handbook of Economic, Social & Cultural Rights, International Journal of Constitutional Law, American Journal of International Law: Unbound, South African Journal on Human Rights, Indian Law Review, Verfassungs und Recht in Übersee, and Oxford Handbook of Comparative Human Rights Law.

Professor Mukherjee holds an SJD in comparative constitutional law from the Central European University, Vienna, and was previously a Hauser Postdoctoral Global Fellow at NYU School of Law, where he also served as a Visiting Doctoral Researcher in 2022–23. His doctoral research received the Social & Economic Rights Associates–Law & Society Association Dissertation Grant, awarded annually for work making a substantial contribution to the field of economic and social rights.

He has held visiting fellowships at the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights (Oxford), the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law (Heidelberg), and the University of Melbourne. In 2021, he was a Social Rights Research Fellow at the University of Stirling as part of a Nuffield Foundation-funded project on access to justice for social rights in the UK.

He has taught courses on American constitutional law, education law, international human rights, and torts at UConn, NYU Law, CEU, University of Verona, National Law School of India University, NALSAR University of Law, and Asian University for Women (Bangladesh). He co-edits the blog of the International Association of Constitutional Law, is an Assistant Editor at RevDem, and co-convenes the IACL Research Group on Social Rights. In 2018, he received the Indian Law Review Early Career Prize. In addition to his academic work, he has litigated constitutional education cases before the Supreme Court of India and continues to collaborate with civil society organizations on issues of educational equity and school financing. He also serves as Co-Chair of the Academic Committee of the Asian American Bar Association of New York.