Alexander Williams

Alexander Williams is a joint JD–PhD student in history and law at Yale University.  His research focuses on the history of corporate governance, capital markets, labor, and the legal profession in postcolonial India.  He is broadly interested in global legal history, comparative private law, and the history and sociology of the legal profession.  He has published in the Asian Journal of Comparative Law and the JUS GENTIUM Journal of International Legal History.  He holds a BA in history and South Asian studies from Yale College.

Alexander’s Fulbright-Nehru project, “The Business of Law: Lawyers and the Economy in Modern India”, is studying the intertwined history of law, lawyers, and economic development in postcolonial India.  The project is tracing how legal professionals and other actors in both the government and the private sector viewed law as a tool which could be harnessed for economic growth, the distribution of resources, and the pursuit of private ends.