Swethaa Ballakrishnen has been named the William H. Neukom Fellows Research Chair in Diversity and Law for the 2025-26 academic year, beginning September 1. Ballakrishnen is the Dean for Faculty Research and Development and a Professor of Law at the University of California, Irvine. They also hold courtesy appointments as a Professor of Sociology, Asian Studies, and Criminology, Law, and Society at UC Irvine.
“I am honored and grateful to return to the ABF as the next Neukom Chair,” said Ballakrishnen. They were previously an AccessLex Visiting Scholar on Legal Education at the ABF, from 2017 to 2018. “The ABF has been an instrumental and influential locus for sociolegal empirical scholars, and it has been a key intellectual home for me. Over the years, much of my writing and thinking has been shaped by conversations and collaborations with its community and being embedded amidst these generative and generous interlocutors offers an invaluable opportunity as I work on my next book on genderqueer identity and navigation.”
The Neukom Chair is named for William H. Neukom, a Philanthropist Fellow of the ABF and former ABF Board member, who passed in 2025. In 2014, Neukom made pivotal lead investments to establish the William H. Neukom Fellows Research Chair in Diversity and Law. The Neukom Chair is a yearlong visiting position that supports an exceptional scholar conducting research on legal and social issues contributing to inequities in the law and legal processes.
Ballakrishnen’s research interrogates the ways in which law and legal institutions create, continue, and counter different kinds of socioeconomic stratification through a global, critical, queer perspective. Their research has considered gender parity among India’s elite legal professionals, India’s gendered legacies in constitution jurisprudence, topics in legal education, and other areas.
During their time as the Neukom Chair, Ballakrishnen will work on several research projects. The first is their new book manuscript, “Blasé,” which offers new coordinates to appreciate equality and discrimination jurisprudence using the lens of genderqueer navigation and identity in the United States. The project draws from a wide range of empirical sources to deliberate on a larger question about sociolegal temporality: when identity categories are not yet legally (and sometimes, not fully socially) recognized, how do they impact the experience of everyday equality? Ballakrishnen explored this line of inquiry previously in their article “Blasé,” which appeared in the April 2025 issue of Law & Society Review.
In addition to this project, Ballakrishnen will continue to work on several other projects on the legal profession, including a coedited volume on global legal education with ABF Interim Executive Director Bryant Garth and a coedited law school textbook on professional responsibility.
Ballakrishnen also plans to complete the last wave of their NSF funded research on diversity in law student and legal professional networks. Research from earlier waves can be found in Law and Social Inquiry. A full bibliography of their publications is available here.
“Professor Ballakrishnen’s scholarship brings energy and insight to the study of inequality and legal institutions, work that deeply reflects the Neukom Chair’s aim to support research in diversity and law,” said Frank X. Neuner, Jr., Chair of the Fellows of the American Bar Foundation. “The Fellows are thrilled by this appointment.”
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About the American Bar Foundation
The American Bar Foundation (ABF) is the world’s leading research institute for the empirical and interdisciplinary study of law. The ABF seeks to expand knowledge and advance justice through innovative, interdisciplinary, and rigorous empirical research on law, legal processes, and legal institutions. To further this mission the ABF will produce timely, cutting-edge research of the highest quality to inform and guide the legal profession, the academy, and society in the United States and internationally. The ABF’s primary funding is provided by the American Bar Endowment and the Fellows of The American Bar Foundation