Article
Aseem Mehta is currently a J.D. candidate at Yale Law School where he is a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellow and a Reinhardt Fellow. He is dedicated to working in collaboration with community organizations that frame their inquiries at intersections: of individual and collective needs, of short and long-term consequences, of holding power accountable and building new forms of power.
His advocacy is focused on racial and economic justice. He has worked with the ACLU of Southern California on litigation challenging immigration detention policy and with organizers at the New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice contesting discriminatory policing practices. Previously, as a Fellow with Immigrant Justice Corps, he worked alongside immigrants challenging mass deportations in New York and South Texas. His advocacy connects legal strategy with narrative journalism, documentary film and digital campaigns. As the director of the Yale Visual Law Project, Aseem co-directed documentary films on solitary confinement and immigration detention, facilitating a platform from which grassroots organizers and affected community members have addressed audiences at film festivals, museums, and legislative chambers. He has conducted research on prison policy reform as a Liman Summer Fellow at the Vera Institute of Justice in New York, and digital privacy as a Humanity in Action-Pat Cox Fellow at the European Parliament’s Legal Affairs Committee in Brussels.
Aseem graduated from Yale’s Ethics, Politics & Economics program magna cum laude where his thesis, an analysis of the expression of political voice by undocumented communities, was awarded the Hume Prize for the best joint empirical and theoretical approach to understanding public policy.
Updated October 2019