Room 5.41 - Kramer Law Building

Dr Sanya Samtani is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Public Law. Sanya completed her DPhil and BCL at the University of Oxford as a Rhodes scholar (India and Magdalen 2015), and her BA LLB (Hons.) at NALSAR University of Law, Hyderabad.

While at Oxford, Sanya was a tutor in public international law, a Research Associate at the Oxford Human Rights Hub, and a Graduate Research Resident at the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights. Sanya also served as a foreign Law Clerk at the Constitutional Court of South Africa in 2018.

Following the completion of her DPhil, Sanya secured a National Research Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the SARCHI Chair of International and Constitutional Law at the University of Pretoria. She then spent approximately three years at the University of the Witwatersrand as a Senior Researcher in the Mandela Institute, conducting research supervision and lecturing on international law, constitutional law and human rights law courses. She has also taught an elective course as a Visiting Lecturer at her alma mater, NALSAR University of Law.

Fundamentally, Sanya’s research aims to understand how discrete legal regimes interact with one another internationally and domestically and study the impact of this interaction on creating, reifying and remedying inequality. She explored this in her DPhil thesis in the context of intellectual property and human rights. Her research considered the role of copyright as a barrier to accessing educational materials in the global South by analysing the international and domestic legal regimes and associated institutions that operate to create the problem and that are capable of rectifying it. Sanya's forthcoming monograph, Access norms in tension: copyright and human rights in international and domestic law, will be published by Brill in late 2026.

Sanya has acted as an academic advisor to NGOs and disability groups on national litigation in the High Court and Constitutional Court and the South African government on international litigation in the International Court of Justice. Her research at the intersection of intellectual property and human rights has also fed into parliamentary law reform driven by disability groups in South Africa.

At UCT, Sanya teaches on the international and constitutional law courses on the LLB programme and on the international law modules on the LLM programme. She is open to supervising students in her core fields of interest which include critical approaches to international law, international dispute settlement, regime interaction, the relationship between international and domestic law, constitutional law, human rights law, and access to knowledge.

A full list of her publications is available at ResearchGate and ORCID.