Ajay K. Mehrotra is a Research Professor at the ABF and former Executive Director (2015-2022). He is also a Professor of Law at Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law, and an Affiliated Professor of History at Northwestern University. From 2001 to 2003 he was a Doctoral Fellow at the ABF while completing his Ph.D. 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 U.S. Intellectual History. More recently, he is co-editor (with Lawrence Zeleank) 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, Law.360, and The Washington Monthly.
Mehrotra has received grants and fellowships from the American Academic of Arts & Sciences, the AccessLex Institute, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation.
