Ajay K. Mehrotra

Trustee. Research Professor and Former Executive Director, American Bar Foundation

Dr. Ajay K. Mehrotra is a research professor at the American Bar Foundation (ABF), where he formerly served as the executive director. The Chicago-based, independent, nonprofit research institute focuses on the empirical and interdisciplinary study of law, legal institutions, and legal processes. Dr. Mehrotra is also a professor of law at the Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law, and an affiliated professor of history at Northwestern University. Dr. Mehrotra’s scholarship and teaching focus on legal history and tax law. More generally, his research explores law and political economy in historical and comparative perspective, with a particular focus on tax law and policy. He is the author of Making the Modern American Fiscal State: Law, Politics and the Rise of Progressive Taxation, 1877-1929 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), which received the 2014 Best Book award from the U.S. Society for Intellectual History. He is the co-editor (with Isaac William Martin and Monica Prasad) of The New Fiscal Sociology: Taxation in Comparative and Historical Perspective (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009). His writings have also appeared in student-edited law reviews and interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed journals including Law & Social Inquiry, Law & History Review, and Law & Society Review. Dr. Mehrotra’s scholarship, teaching, and programmatic efforts have been supported by grants and fellowships from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the AccessLex Institute, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council. Before joining the ABF and Northwestern, Dr. Mehrotra taught American legal history, federal income tax, taxation of business entities, and tax policy at the Indiana University Maurer School of Law. He also co-taught strategic tax planning at the Indiana University Kelley School of Business. Additionally, he was an adjunct professor of history at Indiana University and an affiliated faculty member of the Lin & Vincent Ostrom Workshop on Political Theory and Policy Analysis. Prior to his time at Indiana University, he was a doctoral fellow at the ABF. After law school and before he embarked on his academic career, Mehrotra was an associate in the structured finance department of the New York offices of J.P. Morgan. Dr. Mehrotra received his bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Michigan, his Juris Doctor degree from Georgetown University, and his doctorate in American history from the University of Chicago.