Seattle University School of Law
Associate Professor of Law
Associate Dean of Graduate Programs
Faculty Director of India Center
About
I am a law professor specializing in reproductive rights law, comparative law, and feminist legal theory. The focus of my research work is to understand and solve human rights issues globally focusing on India and the United States. My scholarship has been published in numerous legal and social sciences journals. I am a regular media commentator on reproductive rights. I have founded and led numerous centers and organizations at Cornell Law School, University of Chicago Law School, and Seattle University School of Law.
I founded the Cornell International Human Rights Clinic, the University of Chicago International Human Rights Clinic, the Avon Global Center for Women & Justice at Cornell Law School, the Cornell India Law Center, and the India Center for Law and Justice at Seattle University School of Law. I am the founding faculty director of an online Master’s in Legal Studies Program at Cornell Law School. In that role, I designed the curriculum, recruited tenured and adjuncts to teach courses, created admissions criteria, and coordinated with instructional designers and other administrators for this new master's program at Cornell Law School.
I teach business and human rights, comparative constitutional law, and contract law. My teaching is informed by my scholarship as well as my seven years of experience as a corporate lawyer at two major U.S. law firms, Milbank and O’Melveny & Myers, and by my litigation experience in international and foreign courts, including the Indian Supreme Court, Inter-American Court of Human Rights and Constitutional Court of Colombia.
Courses Taught
Contract Law
In this mandatory first-year course, I provide students with an introduction to the nature, functions, and processes of exchange, contract, and contract law. The course focused on the predominant rules and principles governing contract and related obligation, including the substantive reasons underlying the rules and principles. Unlike other contracts course, I cover transactional aspects of contract law as well as give students skill-based litigation knowledge. I contextualize the cases within the social inequalities and other social and economic contexts in which they arise.
Comparative Constitutional Law: Individual Rights in India and the United States
The world’s oldest democracy and world’s largest democracy have a lot in common. They both derive their legal heritage from the British. India and the United States are both multi-religious and diverse societies. Both countries have faced and responded to national security concerns in ways that have sometimes impinged on human rights. Each country has increasingly witnessed authoritarian governments that have narrowed human rights, including reproductive freedom, privacy, and immigrants’ rights.
In this course, students learn comparative constitutional law with a focus on India and the United States. I start with a discussion of comparative constitutional law principles and justifications for studying comparative law. We compare the basic structure of the U.S. and Indian constitution and governmental structures. The large part of the course focuses on discussing individual rights in the Indian and U.S. constitutions, including topics such as gender rights, privacy rights, religious freedom, free speech, affirmative action, and citizenship and immigration laws. For each topic, we discuss the constitutional framework in each country, historical and political factors that explain the approaches taken by each country, and whether and what lessons each country might learn from the other’s experience with interpreting and implementing constitutional provisions relating to people’s rights.
Business and Human Rights
In this course taught to (non-lawyer) business professionals, students examine the various rules, laws, and guidelines that apply to your specific business or industry, both in the United States and abroad. Students learn how a commitment to respect human rights can benefit Their workforce as well as their organization. They then discover the steps to developing and implementing a human rights policy to ensure that their organization can meet its human rights obligations as it accomplishes its business objectives.
Education
I have degrees from Cornell University (A.B.), the London School of Economics (MsC), and the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School (J.D).