Areas of Expertise
Employment Law, Comparative Law, Law & Social Science, Legal Anthropology
Courses
Employment Law, Legal Anthropology, ERISA, Legislation & Regulation
Biography
In Spring 2024, Deepa Das Acevedo is conducting fieldwork in India with the support of a Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Award.
Das Acevedo is a legal anthropologist. Her research blends ethnographic fieldwork and anthropological theory with doctrinal and policy analysis to provide new insights about legal rules and institutions. In addition to her work on the law and politics of India, she studies employment regulation and is exploring methodological and theoretical developments in the anthropology of law.
Das Acevedo joined Emory Law in 2023 from the University of Alabama, where she was an associate professor of law. Before that, she was a Sharswood Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Carey School of Law. She received both her JD and her PhD in Anthropology from The University of Chicago, and her AB in Politics from Princeton.
Her research has been supported by the Fulbright Scholar program, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Social Science Research Council, the American Philosophical Society, the Committee on Southern Asian Studies at The University of Chicago, and the Research Grants Committee at the University of Alabama.
Das Acevedo's monograph, The Battle for Sabarimala: Religion, Law, and Gender in Contemporary India, is forthcoming with Oxford University Press, and her edited volume, Beyond the Algorithm: Qualitative Insights for Gig Work Regulation, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2021. Her articles are published or forthcoming in, among others, Law & Social Inquiry, Duke Law Journal, Southern California Law Review, the American Journal of Comparative Law, the International Journal of Constitutional Law, Tennessee Law Review, Employee Rights & Employment Policy Journal, the Asian Journal of Law & Society, and Modern Asian Studies. She has also guest-edited several special collections: a pair of issues in Alabama Law Reviewand Law & Social Inquiry focusing on interdisciplinary engagements between Law and Anthropology; a virtual issue in Law & Society Review on Legal Anthropology (with Anna Offit); and a collection centered on “constitutional ethnography” published by ICONnect: the blog of the International Journal of Constitutional Law.
Das Acevedo is active in the Law & Society Association; besides being elected to the Board of Trustees (Class of 2024), she has also served as an Associate Editor of the Law & Society Review, chairs LSA’s Budget & Finance Committee and has co-chaired its Collaborative Research Network on Labor Rights. She a Board Member of the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology, a Labor Seat on the Members Programmatic, Advisory, and Advocacy Committee (MPAAC) of the American Anthropological Association, and has previously chaired the sections on Legal Anthropology and Employee Benefits at the Association of American Law Schools. Beginning in 2024, Das Acevedo will assume the Editorship of the Political and Legal Anthropology Review, the flagship, peer-reviewed journal of the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology.