Sankalp Bhatnagar

Sankalp Bhatnagar is a Fellow with Library Innovation Lab, Harvard Law School and Senior Researcher with NuLawLab, Northeastern University School of Law. Between both of these labs, his work explores how lawyers and judges design the world around us anew through law. Its purpose is to study legal practice—e.g. making arguments, crafting scenarios, and justifying decisions—as its own form of design. He is leading law students from each of these law schools to re-imagine the design of case-based learning through practice-based research within the world of legal education. For the 2023-2024 academic year, this work is done in collaboration with the HLS Beyond program, with support from Center for Design, Northeastern University College of Arts, Media and Design, where he is a Fellow as well.

Sankalp’s career involves studying how designers tackle complex challenges. It includes work in the R&D unit of a humanitarian organization, an AI-think tank set up to influence scholarship and policy, a design research laboratory challenging corporate visions of the future, and a design philosophy studio responding to structural crises of the present. He holds undergraduate and graduate degrees from Carnegie Mellon, where he earned inter-college and research honors, and a graduate degree from The New School. He has since pursued non-degree coursework at MIT and Harvard Graduate School of Arts & Sciences.