"How migrant detention became American policy," an opinion piece by Adjunct Professor Smita Ghosh, in the Houston Chronicle, July 19, 2019.
B.A., Swarthmore; J.D., University of Pennsylvania
Smita Ghosh is a Research Fellow at Georgetown University Law Center.
She researches the intersection of law and American history, focusing on the history of immigration law and policy, mass incarceration, and criminal sentencing. She uses archival records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Department of Justice, and various human rights lawyers and organizations. She has a J.D. from the University of Pennsylvania Law School. She is also a doctoral candidate in American Legal History at the University of Pennsylvania, where she is finishing her dissertation about the role of immigration detention centers in immigration law enforcement.
From 2017-2018, Professor Ghosh was a Supreme Court Fellow assigned to the United States Sentencing Commission. Before that, she was a Law Clerk for Honorable Victor A. Bolden (United States District Court for the District of Connecticut). She has also worked with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Las Americas Immigrant Justice Center, Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP. While in law school, she was on the board of the Iraqi Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP), the Civil Rights Law Project and the student chapter of the American Constitution Society. She earned a B.A., with high honors, in History and Psychology from Swarthmore College, and a J.D., with honors, from the University of Pennsylvania Law School.