Akshat Agarwal is a J.S.D. candidate at Yale Law School, where he served as the Tutor in Law from 2022-2024. He is currently the Drinan Visiting Assistant Professor at Boston College Law School where he is teaching courses on family law. Before coming to Yale, Akshat worked in one of India’s leading think-tanks in New Delhi and a top commercial law firm in Mumbai.
Akshat researches and writes about the legal regulation of families and how societal contexts and the political economy shape the law and are shaped by it. His JSD dissertation focuses on the changing law of parent-child relationships and its impact on legal concepts such as parenthood, parents’ rights, and children’s interests. Akshat’s current project seeks to normatively reframe the law’s understanding of children’s interests and parenthood to reflect the rise of non-traditional families more accurately.
He has also written about the politics of family law and LGBTQ+ rights in India, the regulation of paid domestic work, and end-of-life care. Akshat’s scholarship has been published or is forthcoming in law reviews and peer-reviewed journals, including the Case Western Reserve Law Review, Yale Journal of Law and Feminism, the International Journal of Constitutional Law, and the Indian Law Review. He was awarded the 2024 Colin Picker Graduate Prize for best article by the American Society of Comparative Law.
He regularly contributes to newspapers and legal blogs and apart from family law is also interested in comparative public law, human rights law, and law and global political economy.
Doctoral Committee
Professors Douglas NeJaime (chair), Anne Alstott (reader), Samuel Moyn (reader), and Rohit De (reader)
Education
LL.M., Yale Law School, 2022
B.A., LL.B. (Hons), National Law School of India University, Bengaluru, India, 2017
Contact
akshat.agarwal@yale.edu