Deval Desai

Deval Desai

Research Associate, Overseas Development Institute and SJD Candidate, Harvard Law School

Deval is a Research Associate at the Overseas Development Institute and an SJD Candidate at Harvard Law School. He has published widely on law and development, and taught at Harvard, Manchester, SOAS, and Northeastern. He has been awarded grants from LSE and Harvard to explore the research-policy nexus (with Rebecca Tapscott); serves on the editorial board of the Hague Journal on the Rule of Law; and was made the inaugural International Rule of Law Fellow at the Bingham Center. Since 2009 he has also worked for the World Bank as a rule of law reform expert in East and West Africa; as well as advising the UN High-Level Panel on the Sustainable Development Goals on rule of law issues. He is a lifetime Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and a member of the UN roster of experts on the rule of law. He holds an MA from Oxford, an LL.M. from Harvard and is a member of the Bar of England and Wales.