Faculty Profile

Gowri Ramachandran

Associate Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Summer Law Program in Vancouver

B.A., cum laude, Mathematics, 1997 Yale College; M.A., Statistics, 1999, Harvard University; J.D., 2003, Yale Law School; LL.M., 2006, Georgetown University; Member, New York State Bar

Joined Southwestern: 2006

Courses    Publications

Email:
Phone: (213) 738-5702
Room: BW421

As an undergraduate at Yale, Gowri Ramachandran demonstrated that her interest and intellect cover a wide spectrum when she received the John Meeker Prize for creative writing and the Anthony D. Stanley Prize for excellence in pure and applied mathematics. She went on to garner recognition for her pedagogical skills as well, as a teaching fellow at Harvard where she was awarded the Derek Bok Prize for excellence in teaching, based on student evaluations, and her eventual career path was set.

"My main goal is to make students excited and comfortable speaking about the law," Professor Ramachandran said. "I think a lot of students come to law school idealistic and lose that idealism along the way. My goal is to keep them from losing it."

As a law student, she cultivated her diverse interests serving as editor-in-chief of the Yale Law Journal and as a board member of the Collective of Women of Color. She also received an Olin Fellowship for Law, Economics and Public Policy Research. After graduating in 2003, she served as law clerk to Judge Sidney R. Thomas of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in Billings, Montana.

A year later, Professor Ramachandran returned to the classroom as a Future Law Professor Fellow at Georgetown University Law Center and taught feminist legal theory as a member of the adjunct faculty there. Next, she was a visiting professor at Florida State University Law School, teaching federal jurisdiction and a survey course in anti-discrimination law. She was appointed to the Southwestern faculty in 2006 and teaches Constitutional Law, as well as Employment Law Transactions in the SCALE program.

Professor Ramachandran's research focuses on employment discrimination and employment law, federal courts, constitutional law, and queer theory. Through her current scholarship, she has been challenging conventional notions of image and identity and the laws that shape those fundamental rights, particularly within institutions where personal freedoms are often thought irreconcilable with wider social good, such as workplaces, schools, and prisons. One of her articles on the topic, "Freedom of Dress: State and Private Regulation of Clothing, Hair, Makeup, Tattoo and Piercing Choices," was published this fall in the Maryland Law Review. "We're working longer and longer hours, and I think of the workplace as more of a public space. That's why I'm interested in personal freedoms and equality in the workplace," she said.Currently, she is working to reconceptualize the law's regulation of the human body and property.