Nihal Sahu
I’m a Senior Resident Fellow at Vidhi. I work on building the rule of law in India by producing research, advising government departments, and helping draft legislation.
I also write a daily newsletter, In Re:, wherein I opine, digress, and declaim on all manner of balderdash, tripe, gobbledygook, nerdery, wonkery, baloney, and hogwash — in the time-worn format of “letter to a friend.”
I’m most active on Twitter and Bluesky. The best way to reach me is by email at nihal.sahu (at) vidhilegalpolicy (dot) in.
Bookshelf +70 books
Personal favourites
I don't write a ton, but I'm quite proud of some of my writing.
the core mechanism • you can practice behaviours, not just skills • identity is downstream of practice • what you end up practicing will often depend on your environment
in defense of paying people to do things • incentives solve principal-agent problems • motivated agents exist but are unevenly distributed and hard to identify
legal realism • rule of law in India • the English roots of constitutional traditions
short • people have multidimensional preference sets • we love the ability to make choices
quitting smoking
the development of modern states • statecraft has a technology tree • parliamentary democracy • separation of powers • rule of law
gain-of-function research on tax cuts
economists and lawyers • the limits of interpretation • what is Law™
literary earworms • finding identity • developing taste • rainbow kitten surprise • self-loathing
escaping formalism for substance • why legal training teaches you to avoid the real world • learning to form opinions under uncertainty • choosing outcomes over process • strong beliefs, loosely held
Research
I have sometimes produced research (>5k words of LaTeX instead of <5k words of Markdown).
Starter Pack all 6
I say, pray for me, pray for yourself, and after you have finished praying, sit down and calculate.
He is a dreamer; let us leave him: pass.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.
We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.
Justice means much more than the sort of thing that goes on in law courts.
You can only be a globalist if you aren't scared.
We are not amazed by the great,
And, more importantly, we do not scorn the little.