Professor Swethaa Ballakrishnen

Nominated Fellow

Professor Swethaa Ballakrishnen

Nominated Fellow, June-July 2024

Home University: University of California

Swethaa S. Ballakrishnen (they/them) is Associate Dean for Faculty Research and Development and Professor of Law (and, by courtesy, of Sociology, Asian American Studies, and Criminology, Law and Society) at the University of California, Irvine. Primarily oriented within a critical socio-legal praxis, they write, think, and teach about law's connection to actors, institutions, and relationships at the periphery, usually around the conceptualization of identities, queers, and souths. 

Ballakrishnen’s research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, AccessLex Institute, Oñati International Institute for the Sociology of Law, and the Harvard Institute for Global Law and Policy; and has appeared in, among other journals, the Law and Society ReviewLaw and Social InquiryLaw, Culture and the Humanities, and the International Journal of the Legal Profession. Their first book Accidental Feminism (Princeton University Press, 2021), explores the case of unintended gender parity in the Indian legal profession and its research has won honors from the Law and Society Association, American Sociological Association, Canadian Sociological Association and the International Sociological Association. Other book projects focus on collaborative legal globalization (Invisible Institutionalisms, ed. w/Sara Dezalay, Hart 2021), transnational gender regimes (w/Kalpana Kannabiran, Zubaan 2021), and global legal education (w/Bryant Garth, forthcoming). Future projects focus on queer utopias within the law, including the sociolegal navigation of new kinds of minority identities, the intersections between CRT and queer theory, law’s commitment to conjugality, and transnational queer visual cultures of legality. 

Ballakrishnen is currently on the editorial boards of the Law and Society ReviewLaw and Social InquiryJournal on Professions and OrganizationAsian Journal of Law and Society, and Indian Law Review, and is the co-editor in chief of the Journal of Legal Education. They have served as elected trustee on the boards of the Law and Society Association, the ISA’s Research Committee on Sociology of Law, and the AALS Section on Empirical Study of Legal Education/Profession. At UCI, they co-run a center on the legal profession, a critical interdisciplinary graduate emphasis and a workshop on socio-legal studies.  

Project title: Law’s Filmy ISHQ

  Law's Filmy Imaginations about the South Asian History of Queerness

Aromantic and non-conjugal relations have attracted the minor-est of jurisprudences. The fractionality of interest in this line of inquiry is perhaps evident. Although often public, non-romantic amity remains mostly unaccounted for in law and its institutional extensions. Scholars have commiserated about law’s implications for singleness and there is some literature on law’s indifference to friendship, but there is less – despite a growing population - about asexual human intimacy that transcends friendship to be a kind of chosen familial love without neat category. In this research I consider law’s contentious connection to non-sexual kinship and contrast it against a growing South Asian popular film archive about kinship, friendship, and aromantic love. 

I consider this view from the south for considering utopic legal possibility for two main reasons. First, visual legacies and the impact they have on cultural politics has been a site of inquiry for scholars of public culture and my choice of popular visual sites (rather than more nuanced representation intended for specific audiences) is similarly to excavate the opportunity they offer for considering the state of mainstream acceptability and representation. Should law be reflective of normative order, or at least aspire to hold witness to it in its deliberations, then keeping track of the evolving architectures of sociality seem pertinent. Second, beyond being sites of “non-law” (to the extent they exist), commitments to subversion – especially as we consider love’s laws - are strengthened when we consider global visual sites beyond the Western canon that prefiguratively offer new ways of considering amity and asexual intimacy within legal discourse.