Research
My work centers on legal compliance and regulatory design: why actors follow legal and regulatory rules, and why enforcement sometimes fails. I combine large-scale NLP-based analysis of judgment and regulatory text with experimental and quantitative methods to test how rules operate in practice rather than how they are drafted to operate. This agenda began in the study of courts and judicial decision-making, and is now extending into corporate and environmental regulatory compliance.
Current projects
An independent research project tracing the volume, framing, and outcomes of dowry-related litigation across Indian High Courts over three decades, using a large hand-and-model-coded judgment corpus.
Examining whether and when legal reforms improve women's opportunities, access to justice, and health outcomes in the presence of entrenched social norms.
A 3×2×2 vignette experiment testing how framing and social identity shape household attitudes toward dowry-linked transactions.
An experimental study of how the institutional source of a legal rule shapes public perceptions of its legitimacy and effectiveness.
Funding
University of Hamburg
Postdoctoral salary at TV-L 14 (senior postdoc) plus an independent research fund of €60,000 over three years.
University of Münster
George Mason University, Virginia, USA
Methods
My toolkit combines close reading of legal text, the scale that computational methods make possible, and controlled experiments testing how people and institutions actually respond to law.
Positions
Institute of Law and Economics, University of Hamburg
Independent research project: "Role of law in changing behaviours when law has low salience."
Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster
European Research Council project, "Equality through Courts: Measuring the Impact of Judicial Pronouncement on the Meaning of Equality in Comparative Constitutional Analysis," under Prof. Dr. Niels Petersen.
OP Jindal Global University
Courses taught: Environment Law, Alternate Dispute Resolution, Corporate Governance.