Swethaa Ballakrishnen (they/them) is the 2025-26 William H. Neukom Fellows Research Chair in Diversity and Law at the American Bar Foundation. They are the Associate Dean for Faculty Research and Development and a Professor of Law at the University of California, Irvine. They also hold courtesy appointments as Professor of Sociology, Asian American Studies, and Criminology, Law, and Society at UCI. From 2017 to 2018, they were an AccessLex Visiting Scholar on Legal Education at the ABF.
Primarily trained within a sociolegal praxis, Ballakrishnen writes and teaches about law’s connection to actors, institutions, and relationships at the periphery, broadly defined. Particularly, across a range of sites, and employing a critical, queer, and global perspective, their work interrogates how law and legal institutions create, continue, and counter different kinds of socioeconomic stratification.
Ballakrishnen’s interdisciplinary research has appeared in, among other journals, Law and Society Review; Law and Social Inquiry; Law and Literature; Law, Culture and Humanities; Social Networks; International Journal on the Legal Profession; and Journal of Professions and Organization. Public and professional commentary on Ballakrishnen’s scholarship has been featured in a range of outlets, including the Harvard Business Review, Stanford News Report, Above the Law, Bloomberg Law, Quartz, The Practice, New Books Network and WPR. Ballakrishnen has presented at over one hundred conferences worldwide and delivered over sixty invited talks and keynotes in a range of academic and professional settings. A more complete list of their publications can be found here.
Their multi-award winning first book, Accidental Feminism (Princeton University Press, 2021), which Ballakrishnen was at work on when they were a visiting scholar at the ABF from 2017 to 2018, unpacks the case of unintentional gender parity among India’s elite legal professionals. The book has been widely reviewed and has won honors from the Law and Society Association, the American Sociological Association and the Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay Prize, India’s largest nonfiction book prize.
Ballakrishnen’s other books include Invisible Institutions (Hart Publishing, 2021), a volume edited with Sara Dezalay which brings together cross-subjective perspectives on legal education. They are the coauthor, with Kalapana Kannabiran, of Gender Regimes and the Politics of Privacy (Zubaan Books, 2021), a book on India’s gendered legacies in constitutional jurisprudence. They are currently at work on two book manuscripts: one on genderqueer legalities, and another on decolonial prefiguration. In addition to these book projects, they are coeditor, with ABF Interim Executive Director Bryan Garth, on global legal education.
At the University of California, Irvine, Ballakrishnen co-runs the Center for Empirical Research on the Legal Profession, the Socio-Legal Studies workshop, and the Law, Society, and Culture Emphasis. They are Affiliate Faculty at the Harvard Law School Center on the Legal Profession. They have served on the board of trustees of the Law and Society Association (LSA), the Asian Law and Society Association, and of the ISA Research Committee on Sociology of Law. They are a confounder of the LSA collaborative Research Network on Legal Education and have served on the Executive Committee of the AALS Section on Empirical Study of Legal Education and the Legal Profession. They currently serve on the review boards of Law and Society Review, Law and Social Inquiry, Journal of Professions and Organization, Asian Journal of Law and Society, and Indian Law Review.
Ballakrishnen’s research, teaching, and service contributions have received a range of awards and honors from organizations including the National Science Foundation, the American Sociological Association, and the Law and Society Association. In 2020, they were named an AALS Teacher of the year; in 2022, they were awarded UC Irvine’s Distinguished Early-Career Award for Research, the university’s highest honor for research faculty.