Author

Faisal Chaudhry is an Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Massachusetts School of Law and holds a concurrent appointment in the Department of History at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.  He has held previous positions in law and history at the University of Dayton and as a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of South Asia Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. As a scholar of the past, he is interested in the relationship between law, empire, and political economy in South Asia and connected parts of the Islamicate world during the early modern and modern eras and the historical co-mingling of legal and economic ideas. As a scholar of the contemporary world, he studies the role of law in underpinning the institutional structure of the market, focusing on how property rights institutions, so long heralded as a key prerequisite to successful development, have also functioned as a mechanism for the extraction of economic rent, both in the context of land/natural resource use and the innovation system.  His writings have appeared in both in  history/humanities journals including Modern Asian Studies, The Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, The Law and History Review, and various law journals . At present he is researching what will be his second historical monograph, focusing on the footprints of heterodox economic thought, including early legal economism, in early twentieth-century South Asia and connected parts of the world prior to the era of independence and decolonization.  In upcoming law review articles  he continues to focus on questions in property, legal theory, and law and development.

Dr. Chaudhry received his PhD  from the Department of History at Harvard University and his JD from Harvard Law School. He also holds a BA in history from Columbia University and is a past recipient of fellowships and research support  from the Fulbright Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Mellon Foundation, and the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory.