Biography

Anil Kalhan is a Professor of Law at Drexel University and a Professor (by courtesy) at the Drexel University Center for Science, Technology, and Society . He also is a Distinguished Fellow with the Center on Privacy and Technology at the Georgetown University Law Center, an Affiliated Fellow with the Yale Law School Information Society Project, and an Affiliated Faculty Member with the University of Pennsylvania South Asia Center. For the 2024-25 academic year, he is a Fellow with the University of California National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement. He has written and taught in areas including immigration law, constitutional law, legislation and regulation, and privacy and surveillance, criminal law, and international human rights, and has worked extensively on academic freedom issues in a variety of capacities. His research has examined themes including the growing and transformative use of surveillance technologies for immigration control purposes; the expansion of immigration detention; judicial independence and judicial politics in the United States, Pakistan, and India; and issues that arise when legal regimes span periods of authoritarian and democratic rule.

Professor Kalhan’s scholarly work has appeared in publications including the Columbia Law Review Sidebar, Columbia Journal of Asian Law, Drexel Law Review, Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics, Maryland Law Review, Ohio State Law Journal, UC Davis Law Review, UCLA Law Review Discourse, University of Illinois Law Review Online, Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law, Bender’s Immigration Bulletin, Immigration and Nationality Law Review, and edited volumes published by Cambridge University Press, Routledge, and the University of Pittsburgh Press. He has been a contributing writer for Dorf on Law, AsiaMedia, and SAJAforum, and a guest contributor for the ImmigrationProf Blog, Yale Journal on Regulation Notice & Comment, the American Constitution Society Expert Forum, and Chapati Mystery. His writing has also appeared in publications including BusinessWeek, Express Tribune (Pakistan), Foreign Affairs, Herald (Pakistan), New America Media, Newsweek, and Washington Monthly, and he is a member of the Scholars Strategy Network.

During the 2021–22 and 2022–23 academic years, Professor Kalhan was a Visiting Professor of Law at Yale Law School. He also has taught at New York University School of Law, Washington University in St. Louis School of Law, Fordham University School of Law, and Columbia Law School and has been a Visiting Scholar at the Center for the Study of Law and Society at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law. In 2018, he was selected by the Conference of Asian Pacific American Law Faculty to receive its Chris Kando Iijima Teacher and Mentor Award.

In 2024, Professor Kalhan was appointed Special Master in Hamama v. Adducci, No. 17-cv-11910 (E.D. Mich.). He is an elected member of the American Law Institute and a fellow of the American Bar Foundation, and he has contributed extensively to the work of numerous committees of the New York City Bar Association, including its Task Force on the Rule of Law, International Human Rights Committee (which he chaired from 2015 to 2018), Immigration and Nationality Law Committee, International Law Committee, and Task Force on National Security and the Rule of Law. He previously worked as a litigation associate at Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton, where he served as co-coordinator of the firm’s immigration and international human rights pro bono practice group, and with the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project in New York. He also served as law clerk to the Hon. Chester J. Straub (U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit) and the Hon. Gerard E. Lynch (U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York).

Since 2020, Professor Kalhan has served as a member of Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure of the American Association of University Professors, and he was an active member of AAUP’s Special Committee on Academic Freedom in Florida, which investigated and published two reports in 2023 examining the politically motivated attacks on academic freedom and shared governance in the state’s public higher education system. He also has worked on academic freedom issues as a member of the Law and Society Association’s Task Force on Academic Freedom and the Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure of the Association of American Law Schools. He previously served as Chair of the AALS Section on Immigration Law and is a co-founder and former Chair of the AALS Section on Law and South Asian Studies, and he also has been a member of the executive committees of the AALS Section on Defamation and Privacy, Section on International Human Rights, and Section on Comparative Law.

Professor Kalhan holds a J.D. from Yale Law School, an M.P.P.M. from the Yale School of Management, and an A.B. from Brown University. Before attending law school, he worked for Cable News Network, PBS’s MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, and the New York City Department of Transportation. He was the recipient of a SAJA Journalism Award from the South Asian Journalists Association in 2008, and was again a finalist for SAJA Journalism Awards in 2011 and 2013.