About

Anya Bernstein is a Professor of Anthropology at Harvard University, affiliated with the Committee on the Study of Religion. She is based at the Barker Center, Suite 302 in Cambridge, MA. Her contact email is abernstein@fas.harvard.edu, and her phone number is 617-496-4987. She is involved in academic activities related to the study of religion, with a focus on anthropology, and is part of Harvard's broader academic community that includes the Harvard Divinity School, Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations, and the Center for the Study of World Religions. Her work contributes to understanding religious phenomena through an anthropological lens, although specific research interests and key contributions are not detailed on this page.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Law
• Social Science
• Linguistics
• Philosophy
• Sociology
• Biology
• Veterinary medicine
• Zoology
• Epistemology
• Economics
• Medicine
• Geography
• Ecology
• Psychology
• Law and economics

Selected publications

• Working with Statutes

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Anya Bernstein, Review of Paul Daly, Understanding Administrative Law in the Common Law World

  International Journal of Constitutional Law · 2024-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Journal Article Anya Bernstein, Review of Paul Daly, Understanding Administrative Law in the Common Law World Get access Paul Daly.Understanding Administrative Law in the Common Law World. Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. 320, £80.00. ISBN: 9780192896919. Anya Bernstein Anya Bernstein University of Connecticut School of Law, Hartford, Conn., United States Email:Anya.Bernstein@uconn.edu Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar International Journal of Constitutional Law, Volume 22, Issue 1, January 2024, Pages 237–240, https://doi.org/10.1093/icon/moae019 Published: 21 March 2024

  PublisherDOI

• Judicial Accountability <br>

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Pleistocene Park: Engineering Wilderness in a More-than-Human World

  Critical Inquiry · 2024-02-28 · 4 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Pleistocene Park is a large-scale science experiment in Arctic Siberia in the form of a future-oriented rewilding project with the goal of mitigating climate change. The park’s creators hypothesize that introducing large herbivores into the area will slow the thawing of permafrost. Using the approach of multispecies ethnography in attending to the nonhuman agencies at work in the project, I argue that the park differs from other rewilding projects, which are usually ecocentric, in emerging as a survivalist project with a distinct anthropocentric bent. Even so, the park’s survivalist goal for humans coexists with ontologies based on collaboration and mutual aid between humans and nonhumans and between organic and inorganic matter, with extensive agency assigned to nonhuman others. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork within the frame of the park’s various genealogies, I trace the project’s underlying assumptions in equal measure to the history of Russian science and to the park’s lead scientists’ experience of sociopolitical rupture following the collapse of the Soviet Union. As a case study, Pleistocene Park is especially suited to exploring issues of time and temporality, apocalypticism and redemption, and extinction and eternity, in addition to particular visions of the natural and the human.

  PublisherDOI

• <i>The Battle for Sabarimala: Religion, Law, and Gender in Contemporary India</i>. By Deepa Das Acevedo. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2023.

  Law & Society Review · 2024-09-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Saying What the Law Is

  Law & Social Inquiry · 2023 · 4 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Law

  Exploring what it means to take formal law as an ethnographic object—a social phenomenon that both reflects and affects the society that produced it—this article analyzes the legal doctrine governing the judicial review of agency action. This doctrine is split into two streams: one evaluates agency interpretations of law, the other, agency policy decisions. In choosing to use one or the other, courts thus implicitly categorize the agency action under review as either interpretation or implementation. As interviews with agency administrators underline, however, these categories do not map onto the structure of agency action. Neither do they reflect the qualities of legal language. Rather than reacting to the inherent realities of their object, these doctrines instantiate a language ideology that pits the saying of law against the doing of it. After a brief introduction to language ideologies, I show some linguistic and legal realities that this particular one erases, and trace its recursive ramification in other areas of legal thought. Obscuring the speech-act nature of law, the saying-versus-doing language ideology helps commentators paint a picture of ideal judges as neutral, passive interpreters who merely report on the inherent meaning of law, as opposed to less ideal others who implement policies that change it. I also consider what a new language ideology—one that recognizes that the meaning of legal language emerges in part through its effects in the world—might do.

  PublisherDOI

• Populist Constitutionalism

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2022-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Preface: Credits, Claims, and Confessions

  Cornell University Press eBooks · 2022

  • Law and economics
  • Economics
  DOI

• Legal Corpus Linguistics and the Half Empirical Attitude

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2021 · 7 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Linguistics
  • Political Science

  Legal writers have recently turned to corpus linguistics to interpret legal texts. Corpus linguistics, a social-science methodology, provides a sophisticated way to analyze large data sets of language use. Legal proponents have touted it as giving empirical grounding to claims about ordinary language, which pervade legal interpretation. But legal corpus linguistics cannot deliver on that promise because it ignores the crucial contexts in which legal language is produced, interpreted, and deployed.\nFirst, legal corpus linguistics neglects the relevant legal context—the conditions that give legal language authority. Because of this, legal corpus studies’ evidence about language use perversely obscures and misstates the issues legal interpreters face. Second, legal corpus linguistics also overlooks the relevant institutional context—the way legal language is produced by particular speakers, taken up by particular audiences, and formulated in particular genres. By unrealistically treating language as undifferentiated, legal corpus work imagines a communicative world that is not reflected in its own data.\nThe underlying problem, I show, is a mismatch of method with goal. Corpus linguistics in linguistics makes an empirical claim: that its analysis illuminates truths about the language in the corpus. Legal corpus linguistics, in contrast, uses empirical methods to support a normative claim: that its analysis ought to influence the interpretation of legal texts. Treating normative claims as though they were empirical findings constitutes what I call a half-empirical attitude. Because of it, legal corpus work rests empirical results on fictional foundations. At the same time, I suggest ways that legal corpus linguistics could be useful to legal theory—if it embraces the other half of an empirical attitude.

  Publisher

• Ford's Underlying Controversy

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2021-09-09

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Personal jurisdiction—the doctrine that determines where a plaintiff can sue—is a mess. Everyone agrees that a court can exercise personal jurisdiction over a defendant with sufficient in-state contacts related to a plaintiff’s claim. This Article reveals, however, that courts diverge radically in their understanding of what a claim is. Without stating so outright, some courts limit the claim to a cause of action or its elements, while others understand it to encompass the controversy underlying the litigation. What is worse, few have noticed that these discrepancies even exist, much less explained why. This Article does just that. We show that how a court chooses to define claim, while usually left implicit, controls the scope of jurisdiction. That choice can force parties to litigate piecemeal and effectively foreclose restitution for underresourced plaintiffs by shutting them out their home courts. This chaos harms litigants, disrupts the judicial system, and undermines civil procedure values. As of this year, it also flies in the face of Supreme Court precedent. We show how the recent decision in Ford v. Montana settles the matter and helps cohere personal jurisdiction with its underlying due process commitments.

  Publisher

Recent grants

• Emergent Forms of Expression in Postsocialist Contexts

  NSF · $184k · 2014–2018

Frequent coauthors

• Arieh L. Shalhav

  6 shared

• Sergey Shikanov

  5 shared

• Marcelo A. Orvieto

  5 shared

• D. А. Nikolaeva

  East Siberian Academy of Culture and Arts

  4 shared

• V. O. Key

  4 shared

• Gregory P. Zagaja

  University of Chicago

  4 shared

• Charles E. King

  Cornell University

  4 shared

• Michael J. Fischer

  Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Cancer Research

  4 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Religious Studies

  Harvard University

  2005

• M.A., Religious Studies

  University of Chicago

  2000

• B.A., Religious Studies

  University of California, Berkeley

  1997