Swethaa Ballakrishnen
Postdoctoral Associate, Fellow in Law
NYU Abu Dhabi
Expertise:
Gender and Diversity in the Legal Profession, Sociology of Law, Empirical Legal Methods, Transnational Family Law, International Migration, Comparative Law, Corporations, International Business, Feminist Jurisprudence, South Asia
Background:
Swethaa S. Ballakrishnen is a socio-legal scholar whose research exmines the intersections between law, globalization and stratification. Particularly, across a range of sites and different levels of analysis, her work interrogates how law and legal institutions create, continue, and counter different kinds of socio-economic inequalities. Together, these motivations have resulted in three main areas of empirical inquiry. The first is a set of interrelated projects that analyze gender inequality and representation through the lens of comparative legal institutions. The second concentrates on inclusivity in global legal education and the resultant implications for organizational diversity within the profession. A third emerging field of interest focuses on transnational migration and its implications for intergenerational mobility, international human rights, and transnational family law.
In addition to her position at NYUAD, Dr. Ballakrishnen is an affiliated research fellow at the Harvard Law School Center on the Legal Profession and the AccessLex Visiting Scholar on Legal Education at the American Bar Foundation.