Lithin Thomas

Lithin Mathew Thomas is a third-year student pursuing a BA, LLB (Honours) at Hidayatullah National Law University, majoring in Political Science.

Lithin is the Deputy Team Leader for Increasing Diversity by Increasing Access to Legal Education (IDIA, Chhattisgarh Chapter), a non-profit dedicated to empowering marginalized and underprivileged students in the field of legal education. He takes a keen interest in the intersection of law and technology, financial crimes and foreign policy. He is also a fledgling graphic designer and has worked with multiple organizations in the said capacity. In his free time, he engages in a futile battle with the ever-growing and scattered to-be-read lists in his possession.
As a JURIST Digital Scholar, Agnes will focus her research on the evolution of sex and sexual orientation as a protected class in the US, particularly examining the behavior of consumers and producers of the news. She will analyze JURIST’s archive and Google Analytics data, as well as outside sources, to better understand the public’s interest in and media representation of LGBTQ+ rights at moments leading up to milestone achievements in the struggle for greater recognition of LGBTQ+ rights in the courts and legislation.

Madhur Bhatt, Lithin Mathew Thomas and Viraj Aditya have teamed up. Their research as JURIST Digital Scholars will seek to understand and formulate a comprehensive legal and policy framework outlook relating to AI-enabled medical devices. The primary objective of their research is to determine a roadmap that balances privacy challenges with economic growth, particularly in the context of India. For this, they shall be undertaking a comparative study to determine best practices from around the world with an aim to better understand the global perspective. The countries chosen for this exercise include the USA, China, and South Korea. These countries, while being leaders in AI development, possess features that are similar to India or include aspects that India seeks to emulate (E.g., China’s data localisation). To further understand the legal-policy framework and provide tools to objectively assess its viability, they shall be creating a questionnaire consisting of a set of parameters that would serve as a benchmark for evaluating present and future legislations in this field. This, they hope, shall assist in judging the impact of potential policy framework changes. The last leg of their research will focus on studying the aptitude of AI-enabled medical devices to bridge the urban-rural divide in access to healthcare.