For a long time, my close relative's work in law and public policy felt foreign to me. It seemed distant from the kinds of problems I was used to thinking about, governed by a different language and a different set of concerns. Over time, I’ve come to realize that it isn’t foreign at all. At its core, her work is about choosing objectives and then figuring out how to maximize them under real constraints. The constraints happen to be legal, institutional, and political rather than mathematical, but the structure of the problem is the same. I wanted to understand how legal training shapes that way of thinking, and how it helps turn ideals into something that can actually operate in the world.
Q: Good evening! Thanks so much for doing this. When you first started law school, what kind of thinking did you have to unlearn?
I don’t think I had to unlearn anything in a strong sense. When you’re that young, you don’t yet have a very fixed or fully formed way of thinking. I did have some basic critical thinking skills, but what law school really taught me was how to structure my thinking. You learn how to break down arguments, identify assumptions, and reason systematically within a framework. That kind of disciplined structure was the biggest shift for me.
Q: What is public policy?
In India, the policy space is often confused with the development sector, and the two terms are sometimes used interchangeably. But they are not the same. Public policy spans multiple domain areas, such as technology policy, environmental policy, labor policy, and so on. These are content areas.
Separately, there are different approaches to policy. You can work on policy from within a tech startup, through grassroots organizations, via government, or by doing direct impact work. Some policy work is nonprofit, some is for-profit. Because of this overlap in actors and approaches, public policy often gets conflated with development work, but it is broader and more structural than that.
Q: Why does your law degree give you an advantage in policy?
Very directly, public policy is closely tied to governance, and governance inevitably involves law. Any serious policy work requires interacting with legal frameworks at some level. Beyond that, a law degree prepares you with a strong set of transferable skills. It trains you to apply a critical lens to complex problems, to read carefully, to anticipate consequences, and to think about how abstract rules operate in real contexts. Those skills are valuable far beyond purely legal settings.
Q: What is the biggest difference between thinking legally and thinking in terms of public policy?
Legal thinking is usually focused on how the law applies in a specific context. It asks what the law says, how it has been interpreted, and how it operates in particular cases. Public policy thinking is more systems-level. It starts with frameworks and structures, and then looks at how individual laws fit within those systems.
How you regulate something matters enormously, even before you get to the law itself. Questions of design, incentives, implementation, and numeracy are foundational, and many of these are not legal questions at all. Law is an important tool, but it is not the only framework for solving public policy problems.
Q: How does a lawyer evaluate whether a policy will actually work once implemented?
This is a difficult question because it is an entire domain in itself. In practice, policy evaluation often relies on tools developed in economics and statistics rather than law. One common method is randomized control trials, which compare treatment and control groups to measure impact. This approach was recognized by the Nobel Prize awarded to Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo.
Other tools include quantitative and qualitative surveys, field research, and empirical studies. Lawyers are not usually the ones running these analyses, but legal training helps in interpreting results, understanding limitations, and thinking carefully about how findings translate into regulatory or institutional changes.
Q: Where do you see well-intentioned policies fail because of legal structure?
This happens more often than we realize. First of all, when policies work, we rarely stop to notice them. But many failures stem from poor legal framing, particularly when laws do not intervene at the right point or intervene too much. Good legal framing involves knowing how and when to step in.
Another challenge is that laws are dynamic. They are constantly being challenged, amended, or struck down. Even a well-framed law can fail if it is not implemented as intended, or if the institutional capacity to enforce it is weak. So failure is not always about bad intent or bad ideas, but about the complexity of translating policy into durable legal form.
Q: How much of public policy is about ideals, and how much is about constraints?
It is always about both, at the same time. Public policy is deeply intersectional. You are constantly navigating trade-offs and trying to maximize certain ideals given very real constraints. In some sense, this is true of many areas of life, but it is especially visible in public policy.
That is actually what I love most about the field. You are never working in a purely abstract space. You are always balancing values, resources, politics, and feasibility, all at once.
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