Anya Bernstein

AREAS OF INTEREST

ADMINISTRATIVE LAW AND COMPARATIVE ADMINISTRATIVE LAW JURISDICTION & CIVIL PROCEDURE LEGISLATION & STATUTORY INTERPRETATION LAW AND SOCIETY

ARTICLES Ford’s Underlying Controversy, (with Christine Bartholomew), 99 Washington University Law Review (forthcoming 2022).

Judicial Populism (with Glen Staszewski), 106 Minnesota Law Review (forthcoming 2021).

Legal Corpus Linguistics and the Half-Empirical Attitude, 106 Cornell Law Review (forthcoming 2021). PROFESSOR

PhD, University of Chicago JD, Yale Law School BA, Columbia College

(716) 645-3683 anyabern@buffalo.edu

What Counts as Data, 86(2) Brooklyn Law Review 435 (2021).

Porous Bureaucracy: Administrative Culture in Taiwan, 45 Law and Social Inquiry 28 (2020).

Technologies of Language Meet Ideologies of Law, 2020 Michigan State Law Review 1241 (2020).

Interpenetration of Powers: Channels and Obstacles for Populist Impulses, 28 Washington International Law Journal 461 (2019).

Democratizing Interpretation, 60 William and Mary Law Review 435 (2018). We sometimes take the legitimacy of democratic governance for granted, but legitimacy is not something that inheres in a particular political form. It’s a dynamic, culturally specific outcome of continuous work by numerous participants. I’m particularly interested in how bureaucrats and judges in democracies legitimize their actions. I use ethnography, interview, and textual analysis to illuminate how government actors understand, describe, and shape law and governance. My work so far has focused on the United States as well as Taiwan; and this year I’ve expanded my research to Germany.”

The Bureaucracy of Democracy

How democracies actually work—the day-to-day administration of government—is a continuing scholarly question for Anya Bernstein. Now she’s taking her longtime inquiry a step further with the help of a prestigious grant.

Bernstein received a Fulbright Scholar Award through the U.S. Department of State to support her research in Germany on the country’s administrative state. The project is part of her broader interest in the bureaucracy of democracy, a topic she has studied in the U.S.—an old, large and powerful democracy—and in Taiwan—a new, small and relatively disempowered one. Bernstein views Germany as an interesting contrast to the other two sites, with its middle-aged democratic system, a parliamentary rather than presidential system, and a history of theorizing and valuing administration.