Bijal is an American legal scholar specializing in administrative law, structural constitutionalism, critical legal theory, and immigration law. She is a Professor of Law and Provost Faculty Fellow at Boston College Law School, where she was recognized with the Faculty Prize for Excellence in Scholarship and ranks as one of the institution’s most highly cited scholars. She earned a Bachelor of Arts from Brandeis University, a Master of Public Administration from the Harvard Kennedy School, and her Juris Doctor from Yale Law School, where she was a senior editor on the Yale Law Journal.
Her academic research focuses heavily on the inner mechanics of the bureaucratic state, exploring executive power expansion, interagency coordination, and institutional design. Rather than examining agency actions through purely static procedural text, her scholarship scrutinizes the real-world impact of administrative actions on marginalized groups. Her highly cited papers, including Administrative Subordination published in the University of Chicago Law Review, evaluate how bureaucratic frameworks can entrench inequality. She has also pioneered frameworks for a “protective administrative law,” arguing that statutory mechanisms like the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) should be actively deployed by courts to check executive abuses and safeguard individual liberties during political and immigration crises.
Before entering academia—which included faculty appointments at Arizona State University and NYU—she accumulated substantial policy and executive experience within the federal government. She served as a Presidential Management Fellow at the Department of Homeland Security and later as Associate General Counsel for the Department of Justice’s Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), writing regulations and national policies on behalf of the Attorney General, the White House, and Congress.