Areas of Expertise
Employment Law, Faculty Tenure, Employee Benefits, Legal Anthropology, Comparative Law, Secularism
Courses
Employment Law, Legal Anthropology, ERISA, Legislation & Regulation
Biography
Deepa 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. She studies employment regulation (particularly faculty tenure as an employment protection), the law and politics of India (focusing on next-generation law & policy organizations), and methodological and theoretical developments in the anthropology of law. She is the Editor of the peer-reviewed journal PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, a past Trustee of the Law & Society Association, and has held leadership positions in the Association of American Law Schools, the American Anthropological Association, and the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology.
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. At Emory, Das Acevedo teaches Legislation & Regulation, Employment Law, Employee Benefits, and Legal Anthropology.
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 current book projects will be published by the university presses of Oxford and Cambridge. The War on Tenure is forthcoming with Cambridge in 2025, and provides an accessible, interdisciplinary exploration of tenure and tenure-stream academia from a labor and employment perspective. The Judicial System of India, co-authored with Deepika Kinhal, is under contract with Oxford and due to be published in 2026. Das Acevedo’s first monograph, The Battle for Sabarimala: Religion, Law, and Gender in Contemporary India, was published by Oxford University Press in 2024, 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 Review and 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.