Dr. Nafay Choudhury is a British Academy Research Fellow at the LSE. He is incoming Assistant Professor of Socio-Legal Studies starting fall 2024. His work sits at the intersection of socio-legal studies, legal pluralism, economic development, and the rule of law. His research explores 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) involves an ethnographic study of Afghanistan’s money exchangers to understand the interaction of state and nonstate legal systems in the production of legal order. He has conducted extended periods of fieldwork in Afghanistan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Japan, and Malaysia.

Prior to arriving at the LSE, Nafay was a British Academy Research Fellow 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, and Residential Research Fellow for the Institute for Global Law and Policy at Harvard Law School. He was previously a Postdoctoral Fellow 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. Nafay holds a PhD in law (King’s College London), 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 also an avid home cook.