Chetana Sabnis

Dissertation

My dissertation introduces the Intimacy Contract, a framework that illuminates how some intimate relationships receive legal entitlements while others are rendered dispensable. This dynamic becomes visible when we compare officially recognized intimate relationships such as marriages and parent-child relationships to relationships that are arguably as intimate, such as friendships (like in Elena Ferante's My Brilliant Friend) and human-animal relationships (like the ones described in Mary Oliver's Dog Songs). Although these relationships may broadly be comparable in how intimate they are, the state draws an ideological boundary between those it classifies as "family" and those it does not.

I grew interested in this topic during my three months in the British Library archives in 2022 in London where I studied the lives of British colonial officials. Their documents suggested that they had intimate relationships with 'local' Indian women but never explicitly referred to them as 'family.' I became more curioius about this dynamic the more content I read on these shadow intimacies like Saba Dewan's Tawaifnama, a rich microhistory of the lives of courtesans in North India, Jennifer Wilson's New Yorker article on Polyamory , and Jennifer Morgan's Reckoning with Slavery, which offers a piercing view into intimate relationships under racial captialism.

My research involves a combination of computational, qualitative, and quantitative methods to study extramarital relationships in India and non-biological caregiving in the U.S. I've recently started using LLMs, and increasingly believe it can be a powerful aid to research in the social sciences.

• Job Market Paper: The Intimacy Contract in Action (Jul 2025)

  How do states decide which intimate relationships are "family"? In India, relationships outside legal, monogamous marriage lack legal standing. Yet appellate courts sometimes extend spousal entitlements to women in extramarital relationships. To understand this puzzle, I develop the Intimacy Contract: a conceptual framework illuminating how states reward relationships resembling their ideological vision of marriage. This framework addresses a blind spot in social science scholarship that neglects how states extend and deny entitlements to relationships. Using large language models (LLMs) with human oversight, I analyze 2,721 Indian appellate court cases from 2000 to 2024. I find that when relationships resemble the state's ideal marriage - a conjugal life, a traditional gender dynamic, and shared religiosity -, courts grant recognition in 56 percent of cases and when these are absent, the rate drops to 22 percent. This stark difference reflects a broader ideological logic through which states regulate intimate life.

• Book Project: The Intimacy Contract (expected: Jul 2026)

  How do states determine which intimate relationships count as "family"? Why do some relationships receive legal entitlements - such as custody, inheritance, or domestic violence protection - while others, emotionally and materially similar, are excluded? This dissertation introduces the Intimacy Contract, a novel conceptual framework that illuminates how states selectively recognize and protect certain intimate relationships while dismissing others, based on an ideological vision of family.

  I develop this framework through two empirical cases, both involving relationships that lack default legal recognition but where individuals nonetheless seek state rights and protections.

  The first case focuses on women in extramarital relationships in India, a country with one of the highest reported rates of such relationships globally. Drawing on an original dataset of 2,721 appellate court cases (2000-2024), I show that despite anti-polygamy laws, Indian courts sometimes extend spousal entitlements to women in these relationships. Specifically, courts are 56 percent more likely to grant recognition when women are in relationships that resembles the state's ideal marriage - a conjugal life marked by shared household and children, a traditional gender dynamic where the woman is virtuous and vulnerable, and shared religiosity where the couple solemnize their relationship with a ritual and share the same faith. This recognition drops to 22 percent when these features are absent in the relationship.

  The second case examines non-biological caregivers in U.S. child custody cases. Over 2.4 million children in the U.S. are raised by individuals who are not their legal or biological parents. I analyze how courts assess caregiving practices alongside biological, racial and gendered assumptions to decide when non-biological caregivers qualify as "parents."

  Methodologically, I use a mixed-method approach that combines computational, quantitative and qualitative tools. I employ large language models (LLMs) to classify thousands of court judgments, identifying semantically nuanced case details that traditional pattern matching approaches tend to miss. These classifications are validated through a human-in-the-loop strategy involving iterative prompt refinement, random sampling, and coding safeguards. I then interpret the resulting patterns through statistical modeling, close readings of select cases, and interviews with legal practitioners and scholars.

  By centering relationships as the unit of analysis, this project offers a novel account of state power that reveals its reach into the seemingly private realm of intimate relationships: the family. Focusing on the family reveals a system of power that is not reducible to gender, race, class or sexuality. Instead, it illuminates a system where some intimate relationships are protected over others through an ideological vision that defines what it means to belong in society.

• Narratives of Policing in Colonial India, 1857-1945: A Study on the Relationship between the Police and the State (Jun 2022)

  World over, whether in autocracies or democracies, the police remains a controversial institution. For the multiple instances of horrifying police violence, there invariably exists at least one instance where the police is lauded for conducting CPR on a young civilian found in a lake or for distributing face-masks in a remote village during the pandemic. This institutional capacity to inflict violence and provide welfare is confounding. However, what they do not reveal is the role of the police in relation to the state. The emergence of the police is intertwined with the creation of the state. Attempts to therefore understand the controversial nature of the police will be remiss without considering its relationship to the state. In this paper, I focus on the context of colonial India to explore how in such a contradictory and complicated socio-political setting, police officials made sense of policing in view of their relationship with the state. I find that for police officials, the values and actions that constituted policing were as much motivated by their understanding of society as their understanding of the state. By moving and travelling to different spaces and building relationships with individuals not only in the police but outside as well, police officials developed a granular, sophisticated understanding of what they believed constituted the state. This view helps explain why the police officials are paradoxically as capable of inflicting violence as they are of providing welfare.

• Analyzing Court Cases using an LLM-with-a-Human-in-the-Loop Approach

  This paper introduces a novel LLM-with-a-human-in-the-loop approach to analyze court cases at scale. Existing judicial decision-making analyses has typically used pattern matching to obtain case detail. However, lexical matches can yield insight to a restricted degree. To capture the semantic meaning in court cases, an LLM-with-a-human-in-the-loop approach is compelling: It enables nuanced data collection while also mitigating hallucinations and enhancing validity. I illustrate the utility of this approach by discussing how I deployed LLMs to collect detailed case information in two contexts: India and the U.S.

My teaching philosophy centers on three principles: facilitate critical inquiry, encourage familiarity with key concepts, and a recognition that learning is a personal journey. These are a few of the courses I have helped teach:

• Contesting Injustice (Fall 2024)
• The State, Conflict, and Political Order (Spring 2024)
• Rise of China (Fall 2023)

Last updated: Jul 2025