Dr. Maryam S. Khan
Research Fellow
Maryam Khan is a socio-legal scholar on South Asia, and a resident Research Fellow at IDEAS since 2014. She has an SJD (Doctor of Juridical Science) from University of Wisconsin Law School (2024), an LLM from Yale Law School (2009), a Graduate Diploma in Law (GDL) and Bar-at-Law from Lincoln’s Inn (2002-2003), and a B.A. in Government from Cornell University (2000). She is the first Pakistani to be awarded the Oscar M. Ruebhausen Yale South Asia Fellowship (2010).
Her academic journey began as a faculty member at the Law & Policy Program at LUMS (2006-2008, 2010-2013), where she was involved with curricular development for the innovative 5-year B.A./LL.B program. She designed and taught courses on Tort Law, Criminal Law, and Comparative Constitutional Law, and also facilitated the setting up of a Legal Aid Clinic (2013).
As an academic and policy researcher at IDEAS, Maryam uses qualitative methods to study federalism and ethnic conflict, judicialization, legal mobilization, social movements, women’s struggles, comparative constitutionalism, and post-colonial constitutional history through an interdisciplinary lens. Presently, she is the country lead for Pakistan for a 5-year ESRC-funded project in collaboration with the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), University of Sussex for ‘Sustaining Power for Women’s Rights in South Asia’ (SuPWR). The SuPWR project has enabled her to deepen her earlier work on child marriages in Pakistan through a rigorous long-range multi-method qualitative study on the impact of civil society advocacy strategy on reform in this area.
Alongside, she is in the process of developing a public history program on Pakistan’s Constitution at IDEAS. This involves an oral history project on constitution-making, to be archived in the open access digital collections at the University of Wisconsin Law School; a spin-off project on women constitution-makers; a history blog on Pakistan’s Constitution, launched on the 50th anniversary of the Constitution (April 2023); and ongoing public education programs on the Constitution.
Maryam has published widely in international law journals, including Yale Journal of International Law, Harvard Journal on Racial & Ethnic Justice, Temple Journal of International and Comparative Law, and International Journal of Law in Context, amongst others. Her current book project derives from my doctoral research on constitution-making in Pakistan.
Among the recent scholarly events she has organized at IDEAS are an oral history workshop on Pakistan’s women constitution-makers, funded by the Royal Historical Society (RHS); and a writing workshop on ‘Law and Society in South Asia’ (LASSA), funded by the Law & Society Association (LSA). She also moderates a Book Talk Series at IDEAS, which is a quarterly forum for showcasing contemporary scholarship on Pakistan.