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Swethaa Ballakrishnen

Professor of Law

Associate Dean for Faculty Research and Development

By courtesy, Professor of Sociology, Asian American Studies, and Criminology, Law and Society

Co-Director, Center for Empirical Research on the Legal Profession

Co-Director, Center in Law, Society & Culture, and Steering Committee Member, Law, Society, and Culture Emphasis

Co-Convener, Socio-Legal Studies Workshop

Swethaa Ballakrishnen

Expertise:

Legal Profession, Gender, Critical Feminist and Queer Theory, Global Souths, India

Background:

Swethaa S. Ballakrishnen (they/them) is a socio-legal scholar whose research examines the intersections between law, globalization and stratification from a critical feminist and global south perspective. Particularly, across a range of sites and different levels of analysis, their work interrogates how law and legal institutions create, continue, and counter different kinds of socio-economic inequalities.

Scholarship from Professor Ballakrishnen’s research projects has appeared in, among other journals, Law and Society Review, Law and Social Inquiry, Fordham Law Review, International Journal of the Legal Profession, and the Journal of Professions and Organization. Their first book, Accidental Feminism (Princeton University Press: 2021), unpacks the case of unintentional gender parity among India’s elite legal professionals; a second book Invisible Institutions (Hart Publishing: 2021, ed. with Sara Dezalay) brings together cross-subjective perspectives on legal globalization; and a third book, Gender Regimes and the Politics of Privacy (Zubaan Books, with Kalpana Kannabiran) investigates the gendered legacies of India’s privacy jurisprudence. These strains of research have received a range of honors and awards, including from the National Science Foundation, the American Sociological Association, and the Law and Society Association; and in 2022, Ballakrishnen was awarded the campus-wide UCI Distinguished Early-Career Award for Research. You can read more about their research praxis and commitments here.

Alongside this scholarly output, Professor Ballakrishnen’s research has been featured in a range of professional and popular media including Harvard Business Review, Stanford News Report, Above the Law, Bloomberg Law, Quartz, Law School Transparency Radio, The Practice, New Books Network, and WPR. They have presented research at over 100 conferences worldwide, delivered over 50 invited talks in a range of academic and professional settings, and their legal opinions on family and financial laws have been cited by the Probate and Family Court of Massachusetts and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit respectively.

Professor Ballakrishnen is committed to building and serving socio-legal communities, especially ones that focus on critical questions concerning legal education and the profession. At UCI, they co-run the Center for Empirical Research on the Legal Profession, the Socio-Legal Studies Workshop, and the Law, Society, and Culture Emphasis. In addition, beyond UCI, they are affiliated faculty at the Harvard Law School Center on the Legal Profession, on the board of trustees of the Law and Society Association (LSA) and the ISA Research Committee on Sociology of Law, a co-founder of the LSA Collaborative Research Network on Legal Education, and on the Executive Committee of the AALS Section on Empirical Study of Legal Education and the Legal Profession. In 2017-18, they were the AccessLex Visiting Scholar on Legal Education at the American Bar Foundation. In 2020, Professor Ballakrishnen was named a AALS Teacher of the Year.

For over a decade before entering academia full-time, Professor Ballakrishnen was a legal intern to Hon’ble Justice Arijit Pasayat of the Supreme Court of India, an international banking associate in Mumbai, and an external consultant for cross-border litigation financing in New York City.

(Log in to view full course descriptions in the UCI Law Course Catalog)

Books

Book Chapters

Articles

Textbooks and Casebooks

  • January 4, 2025
    Paper presentation, “Life-cycle Effects of Income-Driven Repayment on Credit Outcomes, Future Student Loan Borrowing, and Labor Market Outcomes,” 2025 ASSA Annual Meeting, American Economic Association
  • October 2024
    Talk on “Teaching Professional Identity” and the integration of practical training and social science research on law at the Widening the Lens of Justice Conference, hosted by Harvard Law’s Center on the Legal Profession and the American Bar Foundation
  • October 2024
    Panelist, Roundtable on Innovative Approaches to Inequality and Teaching: Integrating Social Reality and Empirical Research on Legal Education into Law Training, Widening the Lens of Justice: A 20th Anniversary New Legal Realism Conference on Inclusion, "Bleached Out" Identity, and Ethics in Legal Education, Harvard Law School
  • September 2024
    Non-Marriage Roundtable, University of Virginia School of Law
  • September 2024
    State of Public Defense in California, UC Davis School of Law 
  • July 17-18, 2024
    International Legal Ethics Conference in Amsterdam, International Association of Legal Ethics
  • July 8, 2024
    Presenter, “Law's Filmy Imaginations about the South Asian History of Queerness,” University of Edinburgh Law School
  • July 5, 2024
    Presenter, “Sort Of: Law, Love, and Queer Sociality in Mainstream South Asian Representations,” Dundee Law School
  • June 27, 2024
    Presenter on Blasé discrimination and interactional inequalities and panel moderator, Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE) conference at the University of Limerick
  • June 26, 2024
    Presenter, Pride Week Talk based on “Accidental Feminism: Gender Parity and Selective Mobility Among India’s Professional Elite” (Princeton University Press 2021), Trinity College Dublin School of Law
  • April 11, 2024:
    9th Annual Minority Seminar, Many Gazes of Law: Plurality and Ordering, Keynote Session 4: Law as Legal Profession
  • February 10, 2024:
    ClassCrits XIV, themed “Demanding Justice in the Face of Retrenchment: Finding Common Ground and Building Coalition Across Borders.”Panel titled “Revisiting Race & Class”
  • Received a Nominated Fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities in Edinburgh, Scotland.
  • 2022-2023 Distinguished Early-Career Faculty Award for Research, UCI Academic Senate
  • 2022 Honorable Mention for Herbert Jacob Book Prize, Law and Society Association