About

Swethaa Ballakrishnen is a socio-legal scholar interested in the intersections between law, globalization, and gendered inequality.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Social Science
• Law
• Public relations
• Gender studies
• Political economy

Selected publications

• Blasé: Deviant Lawyers and the Denial of Discrimination

  Law & Society Review · 2025-04-07 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Using 60 interviews with a range of minority law students and early career legal professionals (primarily differentiated by race, gender identity, religion, and disability), this Article illuminates the cruciality of empirical Critical Race Theory to understand individual deviance within the legal profession and develops a framework – blasé – for considering interactional violence that is not legally or socially cognizable as discrimination but still causes harm. These data reveal that discrimination was minimized and denied to varying degrees for all minority respondents. However, for genderqueer respondents whose identities had not achieved a high degree of sociolegal legibility, these denials had low contestability and were often without contrition. Unlike microaggressions which might have resonance in common cultural parlance as operationalizations of structural violence, what distinguishes blasé discrimination, I argue, is the ordinariness of the act in interactional parlance alongside its relative unlikeliness to be seen as problematic when confronted. It is this possibility of defense and justification in the face of being challenged that makes blasé and its ambiguous parameters worthy of our attention in identity jurisprudence. This exploration of the blasé response to discrimination sheds light on the opportunities available for revealing structural inequalities when analysis begins from the perspectives of peripheral actors.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Out of Place

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2024-02-22 · 8 citations

  bookOpen access

  Out of Place tells a new history of the field of law and society through the experiences and fieldwork of successful writers from populations that academia has historically marginalized. Encouraging collective and transparent self-reflection on positionality, the volume features scholars from around the world who share how their out-of-place positionalities influenced their research questions, data collection, analysis, and writing in law and society. From China to Colombia, India to Indonesia, Singapore to South Africa, and the United Kingdom to the United States, these experts record how they conducted their fieldwork, how their privileges and disadvantages impacted their training and research, and what they learned about the law in the process. As the global field of law and society becomes more diverse and an interest in identity grows, Out of Place is a call to embrace the power of positionality. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Kanoon’s Sarange: Goodrich and the Non-Minor Jurisprudences of Law and Love

  Law Culture and the Humanities · 2024-07-25 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This article uses three main global visual sites—the popular Korean drama Hometown Cha Cha Cha (2021), the Hindi-English movie, The Lunchbox (2013), and the British-American television series Ted Lasso (2020–2023) to engage with two main strains of Peter Goodrich’s scholarship: the interconnectedness between law, justice, and love; and the role of minor jurisprudences. Heeding Goodrich’s advice to consider media as an important node for legal analysis, it traces the course of aromantic amity and asexual kinship across these sites to deliberate new ways of considering the law’s liberal commitments to conjugality and dyadic partnership. By focusing on popular scripts seemingly unrelated to the law, I seek to both contemplate on new pulses in contemporary cultures and the tools they might offer to consider the literature on law and love. Kanoon is the word in Hindi for law and Sarange is the word in Korean for love. Translated loosely—and, intentionally with flaws and gaps in logic—as Law’s Love. To the extent we can reparatively imagine law from the perspective of these cultural prompts, I suggest that they offer new alterities from heteropatriarchy and utopic possibilities beyond the liberal queer rights regime.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• At Odds with Everything around Me

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2024-02-22 · 1 citations

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The title of this chapter references bell hooks' definition of queerness as beyond sexual choice

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Diverse Disconnectedness: Homophily, Social Capital Inequality, and Student Experiences in Law School

  Law & Social Inquiry · 2024-10-10 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access

  Abstract Law school students are encouraged frequently to “network.” However, depending on demographic categories, they may have access to differently resourced social networks in law school. In this article, we draw from our mixed-methods research to explore this diversity of experience, its limitations of access, and the possible network inequalities that may limit the value of legal education to diverse students across different institutional contexts. Using survey and network data (N = 744), collected during the fall of 2019 from three law schools, as well as supplementary interview data (N = 55), we examined students’ social networks, the structures of these relationships, and their associations with law school satisfaction. We find that, while students tended to cluster based on shared characteristics (that is, race, gender, sexual identity, political orientation, religion, and age) and contexts (that is, type of program, section assignments), these emergent clusters produced disparities in satisfaction across racial categories. Homophilous networks were tied to satisfaction for Black and White students, but the same embeddedness was associated with lower satisfaction with law school for Asian and Latinx students. These results provide grounds for rethinking how diversity matters in law school and its implications for marginalized students’ experience and success.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Categorical closure: Transitivity and identities in longitudinal networks

  Social Networks · 2024-07-02 · 1 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Rules, with Swethaa Ballakrishnen

  The Sociological Review Magazine · 2024-01-17

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Rules -with Swethaa BallakrishnenWhat are rules for?What's at stake if we assume that they're neutral?And if we want rules to be progressive, does it matter who makes them?Socio-legal scholar Swethaa Ballakrishnen joins Uncommon Sense to reflect on this and more, highlighting the value of studying law not just in theory but in action, and drawing on a career spanning law and academia in India and the USA.As the author of "Accidental Feminism", which explores unintended parity in the Indian legal profession, Swethaa talks to Rosie and Alexis about intention and whether it is always needed for positive outcomes.We also ask: in a society characterised as "post-truth", does anyone even care about rules anymore?Plus, Swethaa dissects the trope of "neutrality" -firmly embedded in legal discourse, from the idea of "blind justice" to the notion of equality before the law.There are dangers, they explain, to assuming that law is neutral, particularly given that it is often those in power who get to make and extend the rules -something critical race scholars have long been aware of.Swethaa also fills us in on their recent interest in the TV show "Ted Lasso" and considers pop culture that speaks to our theme, including the series "Made in Heaven" and "Extraordinary Attorney Woo", plus a short film by Arun Falara.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Professional Responsibility: A Contemporary Approach 5th Edition (Table of Contents)

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• :<i>At Risk: Indian Sexual Politics and the Global AIDS Crisis</i>

  American Journal of Sociology · 2023-03-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Anti/Aunty as Critical Method: From Gendered Resistance to Soft Grace

  South Asia Journal of South Asian Studies · 2023-01-02 · 3 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This article chronicles the author’s transformation from an anti-aunty Tamil South Asian socialisation to a more critical acceptance of aunty–ness as a queer ethnographer. Committing to reflexive ethnographic methods, I contemplate on the figure of the ‘invisible aunty’ as a way of disrupting the field while also being self-serving to one’s queer body and psyche. Particularly, in drawing from the nourishing strain of critical aunty dialogue, especially around discourse and subversion, I share how my own research and personal identities have coalesced, allowing for a radical reimagination of once-distant terms and concepts. This return to past discomfort and resistance with soft grace and new ability, I argue, is at the core of the critical aunty—or anti/aunty—method.

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• Diversity and Networking in Law School: Are Law Students from Diverse Backgrounds Disadvantaged?

  NSF · $511k · 2022–2026

Frequent coauthors

• Carole Silver

  13 shared

• Sara Dezalay

  Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

  10 shared

• Eli Wald

  College of Law

  5 shared

• David B. Wilkins

  4 shared

• Russell G. Pearce

  4 shared

• Devon Magliozzi

  Stanford University

  3 shared

• Priya Fielding‐Singh

  3 shared

• Lynette J. Chua

  National University of Singapore

  2 shared

Education

• PhD, Sociology

  Stanford University

  2015

• LLM

  Harvard Law School

  2008

• B.A., B.L. (Hons), Law

  National Academy of Legal Studies and Research

  2004

Awards & honors

• UCI Distinguished Early-Career Award for Research (2022)
• Neukom Chair in Diversity and Law at the American Bar Founda…
• Honorable Mention, Law and Society Association Herbert Jacob…
• Co-Winner of the ASA Sociology of Law Distinguished Book Awa…
• AALS Teacher of the Year (2020)