Dr Nafay Choudhury

Dr. Nafay Choudhury joined the LSE in 2023 and is Assistant Professor of Law (Socio-Legal Studies). His work sits at the intersection of socio-legal studies, legal pluralism, economic development, private law, and the rule of law. He studies the fragmented and plural forms of order that exist within the state, alongside the state, and beyond the state. His current research looks at the role of market associations in providing normative order in fragile settings. His book manuscript (under contract with Cambridge University Press) examines non-state legal ordering through an ethnographic study of Afghanistan’s money exchangers. He is co-editor of the book Frontier Ethnographies: Deconstructing Research Experiences in Afghanistan and Pakistan (Berghahn, 2024). He has conducted extended periods of fieldwork in Afghanistan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Japan, and Malaysia.

Previously, Nafay was a British Academy Research Fellow at the LSE Law School and at the University of Oxford, Junior Research Fellow at St. Catherine’s College (Oxford), Jeremy Haworth Junior Research Fellow at St. Catharine's College at the University of Cambridge, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law, and Residential Research Fellow for the Institute for Global Law and Policy at Harvard Law School. He held a Postdoctoral Fellowship at Stanford Law School for the Afghanistan Legal Education Project, concurrently serving as Assistant Professor of Law at the American University of Afghanistan in Kabul where he helped launch the country’s first English-medium law program. He has held visiting fellowships at the South Asia Centre at the University of Tokyo and the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law in Hamburg. Nafay completed a PhD in law (King’s College London) as an SSHRC Joseph-Armand Bombardier Scholar and also holds a JD/BCL (McGill), MA (Queen’s, Canada) in economics, and BA (McGill) in economics.

Nafay’s writing has been awarded the Socio-Legal Studies Association Article Prize, the Asian Law & Society Association Distinguished Article Award, the Graduate Student Paper Prize by the Law and Society Association, and the Trandafir Writing Competition Award from the Transnational Law & Contemporary Problems journal. Nafay is an avid home cook and proudly grew up in Cape Breton (Canada), which he still considers home.