ESP Biography

Brief Biographical Sketch:

Swethaa Ballakrishnen was an Inlaks Scholar to the Harvard LL.M class’08 and a ’04 graduate of the NALSAR University of Law, Hyderabad (where she won the Amancharla Krishna Murti Memorial Gold Medal for the best student of her graduating batch). In 2008, she joined the Program on the Legal Profession at HLS as a Research Fellow with a South Asia specific research agenda.

Before coming to Harvard, Ms. Ballakrishnen was an international finance lawyer with the Mumbai offices of Amarchand Mangaldas & Suresh A. Shroff & Co., an intern at the Supreme Court of India with Justice A. Pasayat and spent a year teaching international finance and legal methods /writing at two national law schools in Hyderabad and Bhopal, India.

At HLS, her graduate program had a shared focus in international finance and the sociology of legal education and her recent research has been on the evolution of law schools and students in/from South Asia and the corresponding implications on the legal profession. At PLP, her research has been concentrated on further study of the profession in South Asia with particular focus on the globalization and off shoring of legal services in India. This past winter, Ms. Ballakrishnen was on a PLP Research Grant in India, doing field research on the growth and of the country’s growing legal outsourcing industry. She is currently working on finalizing these findings.

In addition to her current fellowship at HLS, Ms. Ballakrishnen works closely with Professor Marc Galanter (University of Wisconsin-Madison) on the legal profession, consults periodically on legal education-related projects for the Lewis & Clark Law School (Portland, OR) and is scheduled to start her PhD in the Sociology of Education at Stanford University this coming Fall.

Past Classes