Susan L. Ostermann

Susan L. Ostermann is Assistant Professor of Global Affairs & Political Science in the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. She completed her PhD in the Travers Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. She also holds a law degree from Stanford Law School and worked for several years as a practicing litigator at O'Melveny & Myers LLP, focusing on class actions and intellectual property disputes. While Professor Ostermann's research...See more

Susan L. Ostermann is Assistant Professor of Global Affairs & Political Science in the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. She completed her PhD in the Travers Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. She also holds a law degree from Stanford Law School and worked for several years as a practicing litigator at O'Melveny & Myers LLP, focusing on class actions and intellectual property disputes. While Professor Ostermann's research focuses mainly on regulatory compliance in South Asia, she is broadly interested in understanding laws and norms and how they change and interact. Towards this end, she has published papers on inter-caste marriage and the role of skin color in Indian politics. She has also published work on compliance with anti-FGM/C law in Burkina Faso, Mali and Kenya, on the historical roots of conservatism in Indian political thought, the development and expansion of the Indian Election Commission, variation in sex-ratios throughout the subcontinent, the Indian bureaucracy, state capacity in South Asia, and the 2014 Indian general election. Ostermann's work has been published in Law & Society Review; Governance; Asian Survey; Studies in Comparative International Development; the Journal of Race, Ethnicity and Politics; Studies in Indian Politics; and Law & Policy. See less