Ajay K. Mehrotra
Associate Professor of Law
Office: 261Phone: 812-855-7443
E-mail: amehrotr@indiana.edu
BA 1991, University of Michigan; JD 1994, Georgetown; PhD 2003, University of Chicago. Doctoral Fellow, American Bar Foundation, 2001-2003; Associate, J.P. Morgan Securities, 1994-1996.
Professor Mehrotra's research and teaching interests focus on taxation and American legal, political, and economic history. Before coming to Indiana, he was a Doctoral Fellow at the American Bar Foundation, where he was completing his dissertation on the history of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century U.S. tax policy. After law school and before entering graduate school, Professor Mehrotra was an Associate in the Structured Finance department at J.P. Morgan in New York.
At Indiana, Professor Mehrotra teaches Introduction to Income Tax, Taxation of Business Entities, Tax Policy, and American Legal History.
Professor Mehrotra is a recent recipient of the Indiana University Trustees Teaching Award, and his research and scholarship have been supported by grants and fellowships from the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation, the American Historical Association, and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. During the 2006-2007 academic year, Professor Mehrotra held a National Endowment for the Humanities Faculty Fellowship, and he was a Visiting Scholar at the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in Cambridge, MA.
Current Curriculum Vitae [PDF]
You can view Professor Mehrotra's research at the Social Science Research Network.
Selected Publications
- "Forging Fiscal Reform: Constitutional Change, Public Policy, and the Creation of Administrative Capacity in Wisconsin, 1880-1920", Journal of Policy History (forthcoming).
- "From Berlin to Baltimore: German Historicism and the American Income Tax, 1877-1913", in Taxation, State and Civil Society in Germany and the United States, eds. Alexander Nuetzenadel and Christoph Strupp (Baden-Baden: Nomos Publishers, forthcoming).
- "Taxation: United States Law" for Encyclopedia of Legal History, ed. Stanley N. Katz (Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
- "Envisioning the Modern American Fiscal State: Progressive-Era Economists and the Intellectual Foundations of the U.S. Income Tax," 52 UCLA Law Review 1793 (August 2005) (Symposium on "Rethinking Redistribution: Tax Policy in an Era of Rising Inequality") (revised and abridged version republished as "Edwin R.A. Seligman and the Beginnings of the U.S. Income Tax," 109 Tax Notes 933 (November 14, 2005)).
- "The Story of the Corporate Reorganization Provisions: From 'Purely Paper' to Corporate Welfare," in Business Tax Stories, eds. Steven Bank and Kirk Stark (New York: Foundation Press, 2005).
- "'More Mighty Than the Waves of the Sea': Toilers, Tariffs and the Income Tax Movement, 1880-1913," Labor History 45:2 (May 2004), 165-198.
- "Father Francis E. Lucey and President Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Neo-Scholastic Legal Scholar’s Ambivalent Reaction to the New Deal," in FDR, the Vatican, and the Roman Catholic Church in America, 1933-1945, eds. Richard Kurial and David Woolner (New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2003).
- "Law and the 'Other': Karl N. Llewellyn, Cultural Anthropology and the Legacy of The Cheyenne Way," Law & Social Inquiry 26:3 (Summer 2001), 741-775.
Teaching and Research Interests
Courses
- Introduction to Income Tax (B650)
- Tax Policy (B555)
- Seminar in American Legal History: The Legal Foundations of American Capitalism (L778)