Aparna teaches and writes on constitutional law, gender and the law, human rights, judicial process reform, and empirical legal studies at the National Law School of India University, Bengaluru, where she heads the M.K. Nambyar Chair on Constitutional Law, and chairs the B.A. LL.B (Hons.) programme.
She has previously worked at the National Judicial Academy, Bhopal and the National Law University, Delhi where she co-founded the Centre for Constitutional Law, Policy and Governance. She has assisted the Law Commission of India in various reports and has been appointed as amicus curiae by the Delhi High Court in matters involving the interface between constitutional and criminal laws. She is the co-author (with William Hubbard and Sital Kalantry) of Court on Trial: A Data Driven Account of the Supreme Court of India (Penguin Random House, 2023).
She is also the co-editor (with Gautam Bhatia and Niraja Gopal Jayal) of the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to the Constitution of India (CUP, 2026). Her work has appeared in, amongst others, the International Journal of Constitutional Law, Comparative Constitutional Studies, World Comparative Law, Asian Journal of Comparative Law, and the Indian Law Review. Her work on rights adjudication in India has been cited repeatedly by the Supreme Court of India in its judgments. She holds a B.A. LL.B (Hons.) degree from NLSIU, and masters and doctoral degrees from Yale Law School, USA, where she also held an appointment as a Tutor in Law. She has been part of various law reform efforts in India.