- Email:
- amehrotr@indiana.edu
Education
- University of Michigan B.A. 1991
- Georgetown University Law Center J.D. 1994
- University of Chicago Ph.D. 2003
Background
- Co-Principal Investigator, Social Science Research Council, Dissertation Proposal Development Fellowship Program, 2013
- Academic Leadership Program Fellow, Committee on Institutional Cooperation, 2012-13
- Residential Fellow, Indiana University Institute for Advanced Study, Fall 2010
- Visiting Scholar, American Academy of Arts & Sciences (2006-2007)
- National Endowment for the Humanities Faculty Fellowship (2006-2007)
- Doctoral Fellow, American Bar Foundation, Chicago (2001-2003)
- Associate, Structured Finance-Tax Products/Derivative Vehicles, J.P. Morgan Securities Inc. New York (1994-1996)
Biography
Ajay Mehrotra is professor of law and Louis F. Niezer Faculty Fellow at the Indiana University Maurer School of Law. From 2012-2015, he also served as the school's associate dean for research. He is also an adjunct Professor of History at Indiana University and an Affiliated Faculty member of the Vincent and Elinor Ostrom Workshop on Political Theory and Policy Analysis. From 2007-2011, he was Co-director (with Michael Grossberg) of the Indiana University Center for Law, Society & Culture. Before arriving at Indiana University, he was a Doctoral Fellow at the American Bar Foundation in Chicago, IL. After law school and prior to his graduate training in history, Mehrotra was an associate in the Structured Finance Department in the New York offices of J.P. Morgan.
Professor Mehrotra teaches tax law and legal history, and his research focuses on the historical relationship between taxation and American state formation. 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). 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 journals including Law & Social Inquiry, Law & History Review, and Law & Society Review. His scholarship and teaching have been supported by grants and fellowships from the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council.
At Indiana, Professor Mehrotra regularly teaches Introduction to Federal Income Tax, Strategic Tax Planning, American Legal History, and Tax Policy. He has received the law school’s Leon E. Wallace Teaching Award, and Indiana University’s Trustees Teaching Award. He also supervises independent student research and reading in tax law and policy, structured finance, and the history of American law and political economy.
Mehrotra is on leave in 2015-16 while serving as director of the American Bar Foundation.
Selected works
- "Charles A. Beard and the Columbia School of Political Economy: Revisiting the Intellectual Roots of the Beardian Thesis," 29 Constitutional Commentary 475 (2014).
- Making the Modern American Fiscal State: Law, Politics, and the Rise of Progressive Taxation, 1877-1929 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
- “From Seligman to Shoup: The Early Columbia School of Taxation and Development,” in The Political Economy of Transnational Tax Reform: The Shoup Mission to Japan in Historical Context, eds. W. Elliot Brownlee, Yasunori Fukagai & Eisaku Ide (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
- The New Fiscal Sociology: Taxation in Comparative and Historical Perspective (co-edited with Isaac William Martin and Monica Prasad) (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
- “From Programmatic Reform to Social Science Research: The National Tax Association and the Promise and Perils of Disciplinary Encounters,” (with J. Thorndike) Law & Society Review 45:3 (2011), 593-630.
Interests
- Legal history
- Taxation