Neel U. Sukhatme is associate professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center and is affiliated faculty at Georgetown University McCourt School of Public Policy. He is also the Thomas Alva Edison Visiting Scholar at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
Sukhatme combines his training as an economist with his experience as a practicing attorney in his empirical research, covering topics in criminal law, courts, and patents and innovation. Recently, he cofounded Free Our Vote, a nonpartisan nonprofit that helps restore voting rights for people with past felony convictions. Sukhatme’s work has been profiled by major media outlets, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and ProPublica.
His project, “The Impact of Criminal Sanctions on the Social and Economic Fabric of Families,” causally identifies how imprisonment affects the families of the convicted. Using a regression discontinuity framework, it takes advantage of cutoffs in sentencing rules in Florida that determine whether a defendant was likely imprisoned. Birth records link sentencing data with comprehensive information on criminal, health, voting, and economic outcomes across generations. The project also exploits changes in the law to explore how the suspension of driver’s licenses for failure to pay criminal court fees impacts families.
