Northwestern Law News, Professor Ajay Mehrotra Receives Prestigious Research Honors to Advance New Book Project:
Ajay K. Mehrotra, the Stanford Clinton Sr. and Zylpha Kilbride Clinton Research Professor of Law at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law, and Affiliated Professor of History also at Northwestern University, has been selected as a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation. He also received a Franklin Research Grant from the American Philosophical Society, which will enable him to travel to archives for research purposes. These distinguished honors will significantly support work on his current book project, currently titled “American Outlier: Economic Inequality and the U.S. Historical Resistance to National Consumption Taxes.” …
“I am deeply honored to receive these awards, which will enhance my research and allow me to explore the complexities of economic inequality within the historical development of American tax law and fiscal policy,” Mehrotra says. “I look forward to delving into these topics more deeply both individually through the American Philosophical Society’s travel-to-archives grant, and collectively via the Russell Sage Visiting Scholars program.”
In his book project, Mehrotra will investigate why the United States is the only advanced industrial society without a broad-based national consumption tax, such as a value-added tax (VAT), and what the absence of such a tax tells us about economic inequality in America?
“Looking through an historical lens, we can see at least three periods when the adoption of a comprehensive federal consumption tax was possible and could have evolved over time into a VAT,” he says. “The book will explore why a U.S. VAT never came to fruition and how it relates to economic inequality.”
In January 2025, Mehrotra was additionally awarded a Faculty Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. These awards highlight Mehrotra’s commitment to advancing the study of tax law and fiscal policy, further establishing him as a leading voice in legal scholarship.
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