Sanjayan Rajasingham’s research focuses on constitutional law in Buddhist-majority contexts. Born in Colombo, Sri Lanka, he read for an LL.B. at the University of Colombo, taught law at the University of Jaffna, and then came to Yale for his LL.M. in 2018. In 2020-2021 he was a Yale Fox Fellow at the Centre for Asian Legal Studies at the National University of Singapore, Singapore, and in 2021-2022, a Visiting Researcher at the Faculty of Law, Thammasat University, Thailand on a Yale MacMillan Center Fellowship. He has research fluency in English, Tamil, Sinhala and Thai.
Sanjayan’s JSD dissertation looks at how political actors in Theravada Buddhist-majority states draw on Buddhism to construct constitutional order. It focuses on Sri Lanka and Thailand to theorize relationships between law and religion based on the experience of global South states. Sanjayan’s other research interest is legal pedagogy in deeply divided classrooms. Growing out of his experience teaching in ethnically diverse classrooms in post-war Sri Lanka, he hopes to develop theories and methods of law teaching/learning that create the space for professors and students to explore, understand and transcend deep political and personal differences.
Doctoral Committee
Bruce Ackerman (Chair); Rohit De (Reader); Samuel Moyn (Reader); Hwansoo Kim (Reader).
Education
LL.M. – Yale Law School, 2019
LL.B. – University of Colombo, 2014
Contact information
sanjayan.rajasingham@yale.edu