Faculty Feature: Professor Shayak Sarkar

Professor Shayak Sarkar examines the structure and legal regulation of inequality by studying financial regulation, employment law, immigration, and taxation. His far-ranging education includes a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University; a J.D. from Yale Law School; two master’s degrees from Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, in Economics for Development and Evidence-based Social Intervention; a master’s in statistics from Harvard University; and a bachelor’s from Harvard in applied mathematics. He was also a law clerk to Hon. Guido Calabresi, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit; a Sharswood Fellow at University of Pennsylvania Law School; and a Yale-Gruber Fellow for Women’s Rights, for which he practiced as an employment attorney at Greater Boston Legal Services. He has taught at King Hall since 2018.

You’ve pulled together a lot of different areas that all have to do with the structure and regulation of inequality. What is it about inequality that fascinates you?

As a child, I often visited family and friends in South Asia. They looked like me and had names that sounded like mine, but their lives looked different. I also moved quite a bit growing up, from New Jersey to Minnesota to California, so I had an early appreciation for both the California dream and the many struggles in its shadows. That’s all to say that inequality is both a subject of academic and personal interest for me.

With all the directions your academic background could have led, why did you choose law?

I appreciate how the law combines the academic and practical. The poverty alleviation or inequality-focused interventions studied in economics often require legal authority to exist. But legal authority can take different forms, so studying the law allows you to understand a policy’s permanence or power.

What motivated you to be a professor of law?

While I am based at a law school, my work straddles law and economics (which means different things to different people!). Both law and economics address issues of distribution and power, and I love how the King Hall faculty — brimming with other economists, historians, environmental scientists — is both small and intimate and at the same time intellectually broad. That breadth makes being a law professor pretty interesting.

What would your students be surprised to learn about you?

As a torts professor, I feel like I have had a few too many tortious experiences, usually related to my desire to try new things. I almost fell off an angry horse because of a chihuahua attack, and I also almost drowned on a surfing lesson. Life is filled with torts, but we get up and try again (with reasonable care of course).

What do you most enjoy about teaching? What do you hope students gain from your courses?

I love how Davis’s classrooms reflect California. Whether my students are first-generation college graduates from the Central Valley or the children of lawyers from Marin, they are open and worldly.

As for what I hope students gain, California undeniably shapes the world, but the world is not California. We have attorneys from former Soviet Republics and Shanghai studying next to kids who were born, raised, and will make their future in San Francisco or Stockton. I use doctrine as a shared foundation, while creating space for students’ individual perspectives and the law’s ambiguity and evolution. I hope my students gain an appreciation for shared spaces and dialogues, especially in disagreement.

Do you have any hobbies or notable interests outside of your law career?

I have a small repertoire of vegan baked goods that I'm always happy to share with friends and family. Otherwise, as my death-defying experiences reflect, I'm always willing to take a first lesson on new activities, especially when they allow me to explore the California outdoors.

Of what are you proudest?

Part of being a professor and a parent is seeing young people at their most vulnerable. I feel proud of seeing young people trust themselves and me with their struggles and confidences and grow into people they didn’t always think they could become. For some, that might mean graduating high school and learning how to write an essay. For others, that might mean representing indigent immigrant clients in a class action. Whatever their goal, it’s nice to feel like you are a positive part of other people’s journeys.

Do you have one piece of advice for King Hall law students?

Today is a day of life, so I hope that you make time and space for what you value. Law school partly is a choice to delay gratification, but I hope that you still find joy and fulfillment and humor in the everyday (even during finals).

Check out last month's Faculty Feature here.