Education CV
I am a PhD student at the Faculty of Law, Cambridge Trust scholar, Research Associate at the Centre for Business Research, and a performance artist. I read, write, teach, and perform on the themes of law, technology, and identity (more specifically, gender). My PhD explores the nature of the legal system as a communication system, towards a new Information Theory of Law. In modelling the coding processes by which law and society interact, I am investigating exclusivity, reflexivity, and adaptability of legal systems. Through this project, I hope to start bridging the agent-centric critiques with systemic critiques of law and further ask questions about the co-constitutive role of space, time, and bodies in reinforcing structural power. I am keen to explore and develop critical, creative, and collaborative methods that seek to challenge the hierarchies of knowledge production as I study them. For creative commissions/projects, please write to bhumika.billa@gmail.com.
Education:
- PhD in Law, Peterhouse, University of Cambridge (2021-present)
- LLM, St Edmund's College, University of Cambridge (2019-20)
- BA LLB, Vivekananda School of Law and Legal Studies, GGSIP University (2013-18)
Prizes & Awards:
- Gavin C. Reid Prize for the Best Paper by an Early Career Researcher for 'Law as Code: Exploring Information, Communication and Power in Legal Systems' (2024)
- Kenneth Law Essay Prize, for first-year paper titled ‘Towards an Information Theory of Law’, Peterhouse, University of Cambridge (2022)
- Cambridge University Law Society Gold award for legal pro bono work over an academic year (2022)
- St Edmund’s College Prize, for achieving first class in LL.M. examinations, St Edmund's College, University of Cambridge (2020)
- University Gold Medal, GGSIP University for overall first rank in B.A. LL.B. across 8 colleges (2018)
Scholarships & Grants:
- Cambridge Creative Encounters, Partnership with Cambridge School of Visual and Performing Arts, University of Cambridge (2023)
- Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Trust Cambridge International Scholarship, full-scholarship towards PhD, University of Cambridge (2021-present)
- Cambridge Trust Scholarship, partial scholarship towards LL.M., University of Cambridge (2019)
- Cornelia Sorabji Law Scholarship, partial scholarship towards BCL, University of Oxford (offered) (2019)
Experience:
- Research Associate, Centre for Business Research, Judge Business School, University of Cambridge (2020-present)
- Researcher, Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, Harvard University (Fall 2022)
- Project Manager, Cambridge Law Faculty Pro Bono Project, University of Cambridge (2021-22)
- General Editor, Cambridge International Law Journal (2019-20)
- Legal Research Fellow, Centre for WTO Studies, Indian Institute of Foreign Trade, Delhi (2018-2019)
Teaching:
- 'Feminist Legal Methodologies', LL.M. Lecture for the Race, Law and Gender course, Faculty of Law, University of Cambridge (2023-24)
- ‘Law, Technology, Society', LL.M. Workshops for the Economics of Law and Regulation course, Faculty of Law, University of Cambridge (2020-23)
- ‘Inequality and Law’, LL.M. Workshops for the Economics of Law and Regulation course, Faculty of Law, University of Cambridge (2020-22)
- Principal Associate and Teaching Assistant, The Negotiation Academy (2017-19)
Fields of research
Law and Political Economy, Law and Society, Law and Technology, Futures of Work, Gender, Creative Critical Methods
Law as code and power: towards an information theory of law
Summary
My first-year paper is an introduction to what I call the 'information theory of law'. It applies an external frame, C.E. Shannon’s information (or communication) theory, to law based on its positioning as a social system in Niklas Luhmann’s terms. Shannon’s frame and its shortcomings reveal how law interacts and co-evolves with its environment. By inquiring into the nature of law as an information system and how it encodes and shapes our identities (with a special focus on gender), I have arrived at three claims. Law is a type of social information system that is exclusive, reflexive, and adaptive. I went for fieldwork in the second year where I interviewed a range of legal experts working in different spaces of law-making, at different nodes of the communication cycle, to understand how their identities and lived experiences influence their contributions to the legal coding processes, and by extension, the legal code itself. I am currently analysing and interpreting the data through traditional thematic analysis as well as new embodied and creative methods.
Supervisors
Prof. Simon Deakin (supervisor), Dr. Jennifer Cobbe (advisor)
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