Priya S. Gupta

Associate Professor

Chancellor Day Hall
3644 Peel Street
Room 42
Montreal, Quebec
Canada H3A 1W9

514-398-6629 [office]
priya.s.gupta [at] mcgill.ca (Email)

Professor Priya S. Gupta [a woman with brown skin and dark hair; she wears large-framed glasses and a black blouse]


SSRN: ssrn.com/author=1550331
Academia: mcgill.academia.edu/PriyaGupta


Biography

Priya S. Gupta is Associate Professor of Law at McGill University's Faculty of Law, where she teaches and writes in the areas of property law and critical race theory. She previously served as Professor of Law at Southwestern Law School, where she taught Property, Critical Race Theory, Public International Law, and Law & Development. Prior to joining Southwestern, she was assistant professor and Co-Director of the Centre for Women, Law & Social Change as part of the founding faculty of Jindal Global Law School in Delhi NCR, India. She has visited at a number of institutions, including most recently Osgoode Hall and King’s College, London.

Professor Gupta’s scholarship examines the intersections of property, race, and capitalism. More specifically, she is interested in how property regimes perpetuate inequality, particularly racial inequality, despite numerous attempts to achieve just the opposite. Her work has focused on access to housing and the question of “who can live where” in a number of jurisdictions, including the United States, Canada, India, and the United Kingdom. Her recent research explores how a variety of property regimes – from those governing housing to those regulating financial instruments - implicate urban governance and racial capitalism in the global context of financial capitalism.

She is currently Affiliated Faculty with the Transnational Law Institute at King’s College, London, and with the India Law Institute at Seattle University Faculty of Law and she convenes the McGill Law Critical Race Reading Salon. She has also served in various academic institutions and collaborations, including recently as the Chair of the American Association of Law School’s Property Section, and as a board member of the Association for Law, Property, and Society.

Professor Gupta has been actively involved in a number of community-oriented initiatives. These include securing government welfare for and with rural populations in India, various voting rights and access projects, and more recently, continued service on the Board of Directors for the Parkdale Neighborhood Land Trust, a large community land trust and advocacy group for affordable housing in Toronto, Canada. She has also advised a Minister of Provincial Parliament on legislation to stem money laundering and the financialization of housing in Ontario and she has been part of legal efforts to secure fair election laws in Toronto.

Recently, she has published in The Cambridge Journal of Economics, The University of Pennsylvania Journal of International Law, Transnational Legal Theory, as well as The Oxford Handbook of Transnational Law.

Professor Priya S. Gupta holds a B.A. in Economics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; an MSc. in International Political Economy from the London School of Economics; a juris doctorate (J.D.) from New York University School of Law; and a Ph.D. in Law from the London School of Economics.

Areas of interest

Property Law, Critical Race Theory, Urban Governance, Law and Development, Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL), Housing, Financialization

Recent publications

  • "Property and Race," in Nicole Graham, Margaret Davies, and Professor Lee Godden (eds.) The Routledge Handbook of Property, Law and Society (Routledge, forthcoming 2022)
  • Property in Law & Development, in Ruth Buchanan, Luis Eslava, Sundhya Pahuja (eds.) Oxford Handbook of Law and Development (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2022)
  • Gurgaon’s Real (Estate) Dreamworld: Governing India’s Millennium City into Financial Capitalism, City (forthcoming, 2021)
  • State and Local Regulation Promoting Affordable Housing, in The Legal Guide to Affordable Housing Development, 3rd Edition (American Bar Association, 2021; with Peter Salsich and Navneet Grewal)
  • "Transnational Property Law," in Peer Zumbansen (ed.) Oxford Handbook of  Transnational Law (Oxford University Press, 2021)
  • "A Calculated, Jubilant Violence and the Meanings of 'Lawful'," Critical Legal Thinking (Feb. 1, 2021)
  • "Globalizing Property" 41 University of Pennsylvania Journal of International Law 611-686 (2020)
  • "The Entwined Futures of Financialisation and Cities," 43 Cambridge Journal of Economics 1123-1148 (2019)
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