An experienced and passionate teacher of interdisciplinary and comparative courses in law, religion, and gender and sexuality (inclusive of US courses in family law, constitutional law, and civil procedure), Jeff is currently expanding upon research and scholarly approaches developed for A Secular Need: Islamic Law and State Governance in Contemporary India (University of Washington Press, Global South Asia series, 2020) while also working on his next monograph bringing comparative perspectives to bear on the question of what makes a sexuality or gender rights judgment a ‘landmark’ judgment.
Jeff's scholarship has appeared in top-ranked international peer-reviewed journals like Law & Social Inquiry, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Modern Asian Studies, Asian Journal of Law and Society, and Modern Law Review. He has also published in the National Law School of India Review and many U.S. law journals. Jeff is the South Asia contributor to the field-defining Oxford Handbook of Islamic Law, the co-editor of an Indian Law Review special issue on family law, also the co-editor of a pathbreaking volume Queer and Religious Alliances in Family Law Politics and Beyond (Anthem Press, 2022), and the co-editor too of a forthcoming special issue of Transgender Studies Quarterly on the theme of “Re-Imagining Trans in Contemporary South Asia: Moving With, Against, and Beyond the State.“
Jeff’s research interests are in the areas of comparative law and religion, Islamic law, legal pluralism, family law, and gender and sexuality. He has lectured widely on these topics in North America, South Asia, Europe, and Australia, where he has been a New Generation Network scholar and Senior Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne.
Jeff has taught around the world, including for many years in the United States, where he has also held research fellowships at Yale Law School (Oscar M. Ruebhausen program), Harvard Law School (Islamic Legal Studies Program), and Columbia Law School (Center for the Study of Law and Culture). Earlier in his career, Jeff taught law in Pakistan while a recipient of a fellowship from the U.S. Fulbright Foundation and later served as Dean and Professor of the Shaikh Ahmad Hassan School of Law at the Lahore University of Management Sciences. Jeff earned his J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School.
In 2023, Jeff gave papers at Princeton University (Secularism as a Value workshop), at the University of Liverpool (Trans*Historical conference), and at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he co-organized a one-day international symposium on Queer Failures and Possibilities: Trans Movements in Contemporary South Asia. Jeff is also the recent co-recipient of a Law and Society Association (LSA) Global Collaboration Grant and used this substantial grant to convene a Lahore-based workshop in late 2023 facilitating connections between global LSA networks and local communities of sociolegal researchers on South Asia.
To email Jeff, use jeff dot redding at the rate of unimelb dot edu dot au.