Anya Bernstein

Biography

Anya Bernstein holds a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Chicago and a JD from Yale. Her graduate research investigated how government agency administrators reconceptualized the role of bureaucracy in the young, vibrant, marginalized democracy of Taiwan. That fieldwork also sparked her interest in law. She continues to study the everyday life of government administration (more recently in the US), with a particular interest in the role bureaucracy plays in democratic governance. She also draws on linguistic anthropology to analyze judicial opinions, trying to illuminate ways that they convey more than they say. Anya has mostly taught Civil Procedure, Legislation & Statutory Interpretation, Administrative Law, and (more recently) Federal Courts. She joins BU from UConn School of Law, where she was Jesse Root Professor of Law. Before that, she was Professor of Law at SUNY Buffalo Law School, a Bigelow Fellow at the University of Chicago Law School, and a law clerk for Judge Guido Calabresi on the Second Circuit. She lives with her husband Nicholas Day, who writes mostly nonfiction books for children, and their two sons, who, at 14 and 17, mostly don’t read books written for children anymore.