Anya Bernstein

Biography

Anya Bernstein teaches and writes about administrative law, civil procedure, legal interpretation, democratic theory, and cultures of bureaucracy.  Bernstein brings the ethnographic and semiotic insights of anthropology to the study of judicial opinions and administrative practices. She has done ethnography and interviews with agency officials to examine the everyday practices through which agency administrators interpret law and produce regulations. This work illuminates how the broad, open-ended democratic decisions of legislatures get translated into practical, enforceable rules. It also provides insight into how agencies should, and do, function in a democratic system—questions Bernstein is now exploring further in a book project with her collaborator, Cristina Rodríguez. Other work unpacks the rhetorical infrastructures of judicial opinions, showing the tools judges use assert legitimacy, disclaim responsibility, and avoid constraints in public law. 

Bernstein has been a professor at the University of Connecticut School of Law and SUNY Buffalo School of Law, a Bigelow Fellow at the University of Chicago Law School, and a law clerk for Judge Guido Calabresi on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. She has published in The Yale Law Journal, The University of Chicago Law Review, Georgetown Law Review, Law and Social Inquiry, and PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, among others. She has held Fulbright fellowships as a doctoral student and a professor, and served as an elected trustee of the Law and Society Association. Bernstein has done extensive research in Taiwan as well as the United States. She holds a JD from Yale Law School and a PhD in sociocultural anthropology from the University of Chicago.