Bijal Shah is Professor of Law and Provost Faculty Fellow at the Boston College Law School, and the recipient of the Boston College Law School Faculty Prize for Excellence in Scholarship in 2023. Before joining BC Law, she was an associate professor at the Arizona State University, Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law and an acting assistant professor at the NYU School of Law. In Spring 2022, she was a visiting professor at the U.C. Berkeley School of Law.
Shah's research focuses on administrative law and structural constitutionalism, and is grounded in the specifics of agency dynamics (particularly in matters of immigration and interagency coordination). She is also developing critical theories in these areas of law. Her work appears in publications including the Harvard Law Review, Stanford Law Review, Yale Journal on Regulation, and the Minnesota Law Review, among others. Her new project, Administrative Subordination, forthcoming in The University of Chicago Law Review, argues that the administrative pursuit of important public interest values harms noncitizens and contributes to environmental injustice.
In addition, Shah is the Chair Emeritus of the Association of American Law Schools Section on Legislation & Law of the Political Process. She is also an Academic Consultant to the Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS) Council on Federal Agency Adjudication. Furthermore, Shah is delighted to be the co-creator of a new colloquium on Critical Public Law and a co-organizer of the well-established Power in the Administrative State workshop.
Before entering the academy, Shah was Associate General Counsel for the Department of Justice/Executive Office for Immigration Review. In this position, she wrote immigration regulations, legislation and national policies on behalf of the Attorney General, White House, and Congress. Earlier in her career, Shah served as a Presidential Management Fellow in the Department of Homeland Security/U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, and served details in the Department of Justice, Homeland Security headquarters, and State Department.
Shah is a graduate of the Yale Law School, where she was a senior editor on the Yale Law Journal and a Yale University Kirby Human Rights Fellow. Shah is also a graduate of the Harvard University Kennedy School of Government and a Harvard University Sinclair Kennedy Fellow. Before entering law school, Shah was an investment banker at UBS PaineWebber.
Recent Media & Appearances
