Ajay Mehrotra
- Associate Professor, School of Law
- Adjunct Associate Professor, Department of History
Education
- B.A. at University of Michigan, 1991
- J.D. at Georgetown University, 1994
- Ph.D. at University of Chicago, 2003
Contact Information
| Law School, Rm. 261 |
| (812) 855-7443 |
| law.indiana.edu/directory/amehrotr.asp |
Background
As a legal scholar and historian, I am generally interested in the development of American law and political economy during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. More specifically, my research focuses on the changing structure of American public finance at both the national and state level during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. I am currently working on a book, tentatively titled Sharing the Burden: Law, Politics and the Making of the Modern American Fiscal State, 1880-1930, which investigates the historical forces that led to the creation of new fiscal order in the early decades of the twentieth century. I am also co-editing a collection of essays that analyzes the historical and comparative dimensions of fiscal sociology. I regularly teach an interdisciplinary, graduate American legal history seminar, concentrating on the legal foundations of modern American capitalism.
Background
- Visiting Scholar, American Academy of Arts & Sciences, 2006-2007
- National Endowment for the Humanities Faculty Fellowship, 2006-2007
- Trustees Teaching Award, Indiana University School of Law - Bloomington, 2004-2005
- American Bar Foundation, Doctoral Fellowship, 2001-2003
- American Historical Association, Littleton-Griswold Research Grant (2002)
Research Interests
- U.S. legal, political, economic history
Courses Recently Taught
Publication Highlights
Books
Sharing the Burden: Law, Politics and the Making of the Modern American Fiscal State (in progress)
Articles
“Envisioning the Modern American Fiscal State: Progressive-Era Economists and the Intellectual Foundations of the U.S. Income Tax,” UCLA Law Review 52:6 (August 2005). 1793-1866.
“The Story of the Corporate Reorganization Provisions: From ‘Purely Paper’ to Corporate Welfare,” in Business Tax Stories, eds. Steven Bank and Kirk Stark (New York: Foundation Press, 2005).
“‘More Mighty Than the Waves of the Sea’: Toilers, Tariffs and the Income Tax Movement, 1880-1913,” Labor History 45:2 (May 2004), 165-198.
“Father Francis E. Lucey and President Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Neo-Scholastic Legal Scholar’s Ambivalent Reaction to the New Deal,” in FDR, the Vatican, and the Roman Catholic Church in America, 1933-1945, eds. Richard Kurial and David Woolner (New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2003).
“Law and the ‘Other’: Karl N. Llewellyn, Cultural Anthropology and the Legacy of 'The Cheyenne Way',” Law & Social Inquiry 26:3 (Summer 2001), 741-775.
" 'To Lay and Collect': American Governors, Fiscal Federalism, and the Political Economy of Twentieth-Century Tax Policy" (with David Shreve) in A Legacy of Innovation: Governors and Public Policy, ed. Ethan Scribnik (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, in press 2008)
"Forging Fiscal Reform: Constitutional Change, Public Policy, and the Creation of Administrative Capacity in Wisconsin, 1880-1920" Journal of Policy History 20:1 (Winter 2008) (Special issue: The Constitution and Public Policy in U.S. History, eds. Julian Zelizer and Bruce Schulman).
"From Berlin to Baltimore: German Historicism and the American Income Tax, 1877-1913," in Taxation, State and Civil Society in Germany and the United States from the 18th to the 20th Century, eds. Alexander Nuetzenadel and Christoph Strupp (Baden-Baden: Nomos Publishers, 2007), 167-184.
