Rohit De / Yale News

Indian-origin historian Rohit De has won the 2026 ICON.S Book Prize for ‘Assembling India's Constitution: A New Democratic History’, which was recognized for its outstanding contribution to public law scholarship.

Co-authored with historian Ornit Shani and published by Cambridge University Press in 2025, the work examines how thousands of ordinary Indians read, deliberated, debated, and engaged with the making of India's Constitution. 

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Drawing on extensive archival research, the book argues that constitution-making extended beyond the Constituent Assembly, with ordinary citizens, provincial legislatures, princely states, women, Dalits, tribal communities, and religious groups actively participating in and shaping the constitutional process, helping establish the document's democratic legitimacy in independent India.

De is an associate professor of history at Yale University and an associate research scholar in law at Yale Law School. A lawyer and historian of modern South Asia, his scholarship focuses on the legal and constitutional history of the Indian subcontinent, comparative constitutionalism, law and colonialism, and the broader common law world. 

Rather than examining only what the law was, his research explores how ordinary people understood and used the law to shape their everyday lives and political actions. 

In recent years, his work has expanded beyond South Asia to examine transnational legal histories of commerce, migration, and rights across East Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Caribbean.

At Yale, De teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on South Asian history, postcolonial histories of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, Indian constitutional culture and political thought, South Asian diasporas and migration, global legal history, law and colonialism, and the legal profession. 

He has also assisted former Chief Justice of India K.G. Balakrishnan and worked on constitutional reform projects in Nepal and Sri Lanka, while continuing to write on contemporary legal issues in South Asia.

Beyond his work on Indian constitutional history, De was awarded a Carnegie Fellowship in 2020 to support his research project, Rights from the Left: Decolonization, Diasporas and a Global History of Rebellious Lawyering. 

The project traces the careers of lawyers who defended unpopular causes across Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, and the United Kingdom, offering an alternative history of universal rights and civil liberties through political trials and social movement lawyering across multiple countries.

The 2026 honor adds to a distinguished list of recognitions received by De. His first book, A People's Constitution: Law and Everyday Life in the Indian Republic (Princeton University Press, 2018), examined how India's Constitution, despite its elite authorship and colonial antecedents, became embedded in everyday life during the country's transition from colonial rule to democracy.

 The book won the Willard C. Hurst Prize for Best Book on Socio-Legal History from the Law and Society Association and the Heyman Prize in the Humanities from Yale University. 

Before joining Yale in 2014, De was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for History and Economics and a fellow of Trinity Hall at the University of Cambridge. He has also held fellowships from the Social Science Research Council, Princeton University's Davis Center for Historical Studies, Melbourne Law School, and the Centre for Asian Legal Studies at the National University of Singapore. 

He earned law degrees from the National Law School of India University, Bengaluru, and Yale Law School before completing his Ph.D. at Princeton University, where his dissertation won the Law and Society Association Prize for outstanding work in law and society research. At Princeton, he was also elected to the Society of Woodrow Wilson Scholars.

The annual ICON•S Book Prize recognizes outstanding books in the field of public law and is considered one of the discipline's leading international honors. 

Established in 2018, the prize is awarded to exceptional English-language monographs that advance scholarship in constitutional, administrative, comparative, and international public law and related fields. 

The 2026 prize was presented in connection with the ICON•S Annual Conference at University College Dublin under the theme, "Reimagining Public Law for a Fractured World: Technology, Identity & Truth."

Discover more at New India Abroad.