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Swethaa Ballakrishnen

Professor of Law

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 and teaching examines law’s connections to actions, institutions, and relationships at the periphery, broadly defined. 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 and cultural inequalities.

Interdisciplinary scholarship from Professor Ballakrishnen’s research projects has appeared in, among other journals, Law and Society Review, Law and Social Inquiry, Law and Literature, 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. In 2022, Ballakrishnen was awarded the campus-wide UCI Distinguished Early-Career Award for Research and they were the 2025-26 Neukom Chair in Diversity and Law at the American Bar Foundation.

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

Articles

Book Chapters

Textbooks and Casebooks

  • April 17, 2026
    Self-Blase: Genderqueerness, Ambiguous Sociolegalities, and Identity Ambivalence, American Bar Foundation Board Presentation
  • March 26, 2026
    Indian Petri Dishes for Peripheral Prefiguration. India Law and Policy Virtual Symposium, Seattle University of Law, Roundglass India Center
  • March 12, 2026
    Speaker, “Bend It: Queer Coding in South Asian Popular Culture and Law,” Global Legal Studies Center, University of Wisconsin Law School
  • March 9, 2026
    Giving More, Feeling Worse: Familial Support Exchanges and Mental Health Among Law Students. Kelley Institute for Ethics and the Legal Profession. MSU College of Law
  • November 25, 2026
    Blasé: Ambiguous Sociolegalities and Interactional Ambivalence, FRAC Presentation
  • November 21, 2026
    Blasé: Ambiguous Sociolegalities and Interactional Ambivalence, Northwestern University Sociology Department Colloquium
  • September 25, 2025
    Undesirable Queers. Nonmarriage Roundtable, Cardozo University
  • September 12, 2025
    Kaleidoscopes of Legal Education. Global Legal Education Book Conference, American Bar Foundation
  • August 21, 2025
    Anna Kimmel Book Manuscript Conference
  • July 2025
    Presenter, Critical Justice Initiative Summer Workshop 2025: The Law and Political Economy of Legal Education, Seattle University School of Law
  • June 2025
    Presenter, “What is a Concept? How Should We Conceptualise Concepts?” including close reading of “Blasé: Deviant Lawyers and the Denial of Discrimination,” Law & Society Review 1–32 (2025), Summer Research Residence 2025, Conceptual Innovation, Methods & Law, King’s College London
  • June 2025
    Chair, “How Do Concepts Surface in Institutions and What Do They Do There?” Summer Research Residence 2025, Conceptual Innovation, Methods & Law, King’s College London
  • May 23-25, 2025
    Presented work at 7 panels and roundtables, Law and Society Association Meeting, Chicago
  • April 30, 2025
    Rethinking Inclusion. University of Tokyo School of Law Faculty Research Seminar, Tokyo
  • February 21, 2025
    Sort Of. Gender and Sexuality Conference
  • February 20, 2025
    Bend It. Global Asias Conference
  • 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”