The NLS Forum curates pioneering research and current developments in the fields of law, public policy, social sciences and humanities.
Our work bridges academic scholarship, legal practice and
civil society discourse.
We present the University blog and five student journal blogs, where leading scholarship from around the world is edited by our faculty, researchers and students. To submit your work, please refer to the submission guidelines provided for each blog.
The Three Judgments That Matter for AI and Copyright
February 5, 2026
This paper argues that Indian copyright doctrine locates the limit on copyright within Section 14 itself, holding that transformative uses producing works of fundamentally different character do not infringe reproduction or adaptation rights, making Section 52 irrelevant. The paper shows that Indian law excludes transformation from infringement, unlike US law which treats transformation as infringement justified, if at all, by fair use. Applying this to AI, the paper argues that training a model is not infringement because it creates a statistical system, not copies or adaptations of protected expression.
AI in the Everyday in India – A Socio-Legal Workshop
January 23, 2026
The workshopwas held at the NLSIU Campus on 10th January 2026, bringing together scholars across disciples to holistically understand how AI operates and influences the everyday lives of people.
This event was reported by Divyansh Bhansali, Samik Basu, Devanshi Ganta, Avanthika Venkatesh, Nethra J, and Sanchi Deshpande from the IJLT Editorial Team.
Between Innovation and Safeguards: Analysing SEBI’s 2025 Algorithmic Trading Circular (Part II)
February 1, 2026
In the context of SEBI introducing a new algorithmic trading framework, this part continues the analysis undertaken in Part I. It demonstrates how, despite a meticulously designed framework, negative implications persist in practice. These include compliance difficulties, absence of systemic resilience stipulations, stifling of the open-source innovation ecosystem, and ignorance of the behavioural dimension of retail investors. Considering these potential consequences, this part conceptualises a model that serves as a possible judicial checklist or a set of legislative guiding principles to guide future law-making or the passage of judicial decisions. The objective of this model is to propose changes to the introduced guidelines to address the identified drawbacks and align India's framework with international best practices. This part of the piece thus moves beyond doctrinal assessment and offers a reform-oriented framework that bridges regulatory intent and market reality.
The Monetary and Fiscal Mechanism
August 25, 2025
Part 1 of this blog series focused on the distributive aspects of taxation: public goods and the market failure that they address; why it is preferable that taxes be progressive and relative to income and wealth; the political and economic case for taxing capital and redistribution; and the economic and distributive implications of tariffs. This […]