Faisal Chaudhry

Professor of Law, University of Dayton
Professor Faisal Chaudhry joined the University of Dayton as part of the faculty in the School of Law and Department of History in August 2018. Prior to his appointment, he was Visiting Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law, where he taught courses on property, legal theory, environmental justice, and public lands. Previously Professor Chaudhry held positions as an American Council of Learned Societies New Faculty Fellow and an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Departments of History and South Asia Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, where his teaching focused on the history of South and West Asia, law and empire, the history of capitalism, and the history of legal and economic ideas.

After completing his JD, Professor Chaudhry earned a PhD in history, with his doctoral work focusing on the relationship between the nineteenth-century ideal of legal science, rule of law discourse, and colonial capitalism under the British Empire in South Asia. As a legal historian, Professor Chaudhry’s research interests continue to focus on our understanding of the role of law and economy in the transition from the ‘early modern’ to the ‘modern’ age (between the 18 and 20th centuries) in the Eastern Islamicate world. In addition to a forthcoming book on British India and the globalization of classical legal thought, Professor Chaudhry is conducting archival research for a second monograph looking at the importance of heterodox legal and economic ideas in forging new understandings of the relationship between state, society and the market among anti-colonialists and agitators for freedom in colonial and early independence-era South Asia. He is also working on a longer-term project that examines idioms of land control, property, and rights in the early modern Persianate legal cultures of the Mughal and Safavid Empires.