Dr. Ananth Padmanabhan

Dr. Ananth Padmanabhan is an expert in intellectual property rights and technology policy. He has been serving as the Dean of VMLS from July, 2023, after completing a mid-career business program (MSx Sloan Fellow ‘23) from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business in June 2023. He has authored a leading treatise, Intellectual Property Rights: Infringement and Remedies (LexisNexis, 2012), and co-edited an important volume, India as a Pioneer of Innovation (OUP, 2017).

His co-authored chapter on Big Data in an impactful volume on Regulation in India: Design, Capacity, Performance (Hart Publishing, 2019), is part of a continuing initiative to examine the public law and regulatory dimensions of new technologies. It builds on his understanding of the Indian State and the Supreme Court within the constitutional context, explored through chapters in Rethinking Public Institutions in India (OUP, 2017), and the Oxford Handbook of the Indian Constitution (OUP, 2016). He engages in broader public conversations on the impact of technology through his opinion pieces in Hindustan Times, ThePrint, Livemint, Indian Express, and other print / new media.

Ananth holds masters and doctoral degrees in law from the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, and completed his B.A LL.B (Hons.) from the National Law School of India University, Bangalore in 2007. He has formerly held leadership positions including founding dean of Sai University Law School and team lead for the technology and policy research vertical at Carnegie India, where he curated the inaugural edition of Carnegie’s Global Technology Summit, an annual flagship conference that takes place in Bengaluru. He takes pride in having created India’s first residential fellowship for lawyers, Daksha Fellowship, with its primary focus on technology law and policy. 

At VMLS, we spend all our energies unraveling what the law school of the future means, and should aspire to achieve. We have built our blueprint for this vision on three key pillars: inclusivity and diversity within our student pool, aided by bilingual teaching support; future proofing our learners by equipping them with skills and knowledge pertaining to the impact of emerging technologies on both the content and practice of law; extensive clinical education with a focus on justice delivery and support for the most deserving among us. All our four centers of excellence, smart classrooms and other state of the art infrastructure, and faculty with international training and exposure, exist and collaborate in service of this vision.