Ajay K. Mehrotra (he/him) is a Research Professor at the ABF and former Executive Director (2015–2022). He is also the Stanford Clinton Sr. and Zylpha Kilbride Clinton Research Professor of Law at Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law, an Affiliated Professor of History at Northwestern University, and a Visiting Scholar of the Russell Sage Foundation for the 2025–2026 academic year. From 2001 to 2003, he was a Doctoral Fellow at the ABF while completing his PhD in History from the University of Chicago.
Mehrotra’s scholarship and teaching focus mainly on legal history and tax law, as well as diversity in legal education and the profession. He is the author of Making the Modern American Fiscal State: Law, Politics, and the Rise of Progressive Taxation, 1877–1929 (Cambridge University Press, 2013), which received the 2014 Best Book Award from the Society for US Intellectual History. More recently, he is coeditor (with Lawrence Zelenak) of A Half Century with the Internal Revenue Code: The Memoirs of Stanley S. Surrey (Carolina Academic Press, 2022).
His work has been widely published, appearing in scholarly journals such as Law & Contemporary Problems, Law & History Review, Law & Society Review, Modern American History, as well as several student-edited law reviews. His writings have also appeared in the Washington Post, Bloomberg Law, Law360, and the Washington Monthly.
Mehrotra has received grants and fellowships from the AccessLex Institute, American Academic of Arts & Sciences, American Philosophical Society, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Science Foundation, Social Science Research Council, and William Nelson Cromwell Foundation.
