Anup Surendranath is Professor of Law and joined NALSAR in March 2025. Prior to this, he was at National Law University Delhi for nearly 13 years, where he was Professor of Law and the SK Malik Chair Professor on Access to Justice. Professor Surendranath teaches courses on constitutional law, criminal law, law of evidence, and legal methods.
At NALSAR, he also heads The Square Circle Clinic (formerly Project 39A at NLU Delhi) – a criminal justice initiative that provides pro bono legal representation to prisoners sentenced to death and undertrials. The work at The Square Circle Clinic also involves extensive research and interventions on issues of forensics, mental health and criminal justice, criminalisation and punishment, technology and criminal justice, legal aid, wrongful convictions, and accountability for torture. The work he led at Project 39A has been cited by the Supreme Court of India, the Law Commission of India, parliamentary debates in India, reports of the UN Secretary-General, and those of the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR).
Professor Surendranath leads a team of nearly 50 full-time staff across the Square Circle Clinic offices in Delhi, Hyderabad, Nagpur, and Pune.
Professor Surendranath currently serves on the Advisory Council of the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights at the University of Oxford. He was invited by the Chief Justice of India to serve as the Deputy Registrar (Research) at the Supreme Court of India, a role he held from April 2014 to July 2015.
His academic writing appears in the Oxford Handbook of the Indian Constitution, the Cambridge Companion to the Constitution of India (forthcoming), the International Journal for Crime, Justice, and Social Democracy, the Indian Law Review, the Economic & Political Weekly, the National Law School of India Review, and the NUJS Law Review, among others.
Professor Surendranath was educated at NALSAR University of Law (2001-06) and the University of Oxford. Between 2007-12 at the University of Oxford, he completed the BCL (Distinction), MPhil in Law (Distinction), and the DPhil in Law. His education at Oxford was fully supported by scholarships that included the Felix Scholarship, the Peter Birks Memorial Scholarship, and the Gregory Kulkes Scholarship. Professor Surendranath’s doctoral work at the University of Oxford was supervised by Professor Sandra Fredman.