Ms Bhumika Billa

Email

bb584@cam.ac.uk

Profile Links

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 ask further questions about the co-constitutive role of space, time and bodies in reinforcing structural power through the language and the physical spaces of law. I am keen to explore and develop feminist, anti-disciplinary, and anti-colonial approaches to theory, and use creative and collaborative methods to ask questions in ways that seek to challenge the hierarchies of knowledge production. For creative commissions/projects, please write to bhumika.billa@gmail.com.

Education:

PhD in Law, Peterhouse College, 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 CBR 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 College, 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

Research centres and interest groups

Centre for Business Research (CBR)

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.