About Ajay K.
Ajay K. Mehrotra combines academic training in history and law with years spent in both practice and institutional research. He earned his B.A. from the University of Michigan in 1991, a J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center in 1994 and a Ph.D. in American History from the University of Chicago in 2003. That mix of degrees shapes the questions he asks about law and its place in society.
He began his career in the private sector as an associate in structured finance at J.P. Morgan in 1994. He later moved into academia and research. In 1999 he worked as a teaching assistant in the Departments of Economics and History at the University of Chicago. His path then led to postdoctoral and visiting appointments, including a stint as a visiting scholar and postdoctoral fellow at the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2006.
Mehrotra joined the faculty of Indiana University Bloomington’s Maurer School of Law as a professor of law and held the Louis F. Niezer Faculty Fellowship beginning in 2009. In 2015 he took on leadership at the American Bar Foundation as executive director and research professor, where he oversaw scholarly programs and empirical projects. He moved to Northwestern Pritzker School of Law as a professor of law in 2016.
His background spans legal history, governance of the legal profession, and tax topics. Early work in structured finance and later affiliations with tax organizations indicate sustained engagement with tax law issues. At the same time, his Ph.D. in American history and memberships in history and law-history associations reflect a scholarly interest in how law interacts with social and institutional history.
Mehrotra participates in a wide range of professional organizations. He holds memberships in the District of Columbia and Pennsylvania bars and belongs to scholarly groups such as the American Historical Association, the American Society for Legal History and the Law & Society Association. He is a member of the American Law Institute and the Fellows of the American College of Tax Counsel. He serves on the editorial board of Law & History Review and sits on the boards of the Law School Survey of Student Engagement and the Southern Educational Foundation.
Colleagues describe him as an academic who moves comfortably between empirical research and historical inquiry. He has led institutional research efforts at the American Bar Foundation and continued teaching and scholarship at leading law schools. He currently teaches and researches at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law, where his work centers on legal history, legal institutions and tax-related subjects.
