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Anya Bernstein

@anyabernstein.bsky.social
4.2K followers 733 following 98 posts

Law prof née anthropologist. Legal language, bureaucratic culture, democratic legitimation. 安雅仁 / Анька

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Anya Bernstein @anyabernstein.bsky.social · 25/06/2026
Delighted to see our work featured in Jotwell — and reviewed by someone who knows what we‘re talking about from the inside, to boot!
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Anya Bernstein @anyabernstein.bsky.social · 17/04/2026
Ooh could I get a copy too? I spend half of my Legislation class on lawmaking, but so far have only done a one-day exercise on actually *producing* legislation. I'd love to push it further for all the reasons raised here -- plus the students seemed to find it pretty stimulating.
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Anya Bernstein @anyabernstein.bsky.social · 12/01/2026
We only need to manage risks that are completely certain! Why would we want to manage risks that are at all ambiguous?
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Anya Bernstein @anyabernstein.bsky.social · 24/12/2025
Yes, exactly. (Legal) analysis requires judgment along with all the other stuff; there are some issues that are need more nuance, others less, and in some sense part of what the test is testing is how well people can tell the difference.
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Anya Bernstein @anyabernstein.bsky.social · 24/12/2025
Sometimes, but I often can't tell on exams -- and even on other written work!
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Anya Bernstein @anyabernstein.bsky.social · 24/12/2025
I tell students that I care a lot less about whether they get the answer "right" (you could coin flip on "is there personal jurisdiction"), and a lot more about the reasoning -- and that I give points for good reasoning even if the end result is wrong. So, I'd give this answer a 1.
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Anya Bernstein @anyabernstein.bsky.social · 20/12/2025
How would Johnson have known how common the usages were? Rev up the ole corpus machine and click some links?
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Anya Bernstein @anyabernstein.bsky.social · 18/12/2025
The version of this I get is, "Nice findings and all, but would this convince Justice Alito?" No. No, it would not.
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Anya Bernstein @anyabernstein.bsky.social · 16/12/2025
This is my hope and my dream. Always the asterisks.
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Anya Bernstein @anyabernstein.bsky.social · 16/12/2025
But who needs tradition when you have uniquely unmediated access to the original brainwave?
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Anya Bernstein @anyabernstein.bsky.social · 16/12/2025
Yeah, this is *legal* corpus linguistics. Not at all the same thing. Corpus linguistics in linguistics is actually kind of awesome. A little primer with examples in Part I here (and an explanation of why the two things share a name but not a methodology): papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
papers.ssrn.com
Legal Corpus Linguistics and the Half Empirical Attitude
Legal writers have recently turned to corpus linguistics to interpret legal texts. Corpus linguistics, a social-science methodology, provides a sophisticated wa
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Anya Bernstein @anyabernstein.bsky.social · 16/12/2025
Also the claim is about what happens when "the people" as a term "appears in a text." So the corpus here is ... the sum of all English language texts? Ever? Everywhere?
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Anya Bernstein @anyabernstein.bsky.social · 16/12/2025
If there's under a 2% chance that "foreigners" or "aliens" appears near "the people" in a text, then maybe "the people" simply encompasses foreigners and aliens, so there's no need to name them separately. Counting things is fun, but it doesn't tell you what the things mean.
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James Goodwin @jamesgoodwin.bsky.social · 21/09/2025
One relatively simple but important thing Congress can do to reassert Article I policymaking primacy is drastically reduce the number of presidential appointees, including both those that require Senate confirmation and those that don't
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Anya Bernstein @anyabernstein.bsky.social · 12/09/2025
For the tween-to-teen set: A book about volcanoes, climate shocks, bicycles, Mary Shelley, and the Frankenstein's monster we live in. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/12/b...
nytimes.com
The Volcanic Eruption That Created a Monster
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Anya Bernstein @anyabernstein.bsky.social · 20/07/2025
This is all very helpful! Thank you. I’ve started handing out a little one pager called “how to read for this class,” about taking notes, making connections, etc. But I think many students don’t have the background to even recognize what I’m talking about. Seems like this might help!
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Anya Bernstein @anyabernstein.bsky.social · 19/07/2025
I love peer review sessions. Just having students read each other’s writing is so helpful—when do they ever see what their peers are doing otherwise?
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Anya Bernstein @anyabernstein.bsky.social · 19/07/2025
I’m so intrigued by this! (For a law school seminar.) Do they hand in the annotations for you to review?
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Anya Bernstein @anyabernstein.bsky.social · 06/06/2025
It helps necessitate the purchasing of a new bluebook! Isn’t that enough?
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Anya Bernstein @anyabernstein.bsky.social · 14/03/2025
Oh there's defintely precedent for it! news.uga.edu/polish-unive...
news.uga.edu
Polish university reinstates degrees earned by German Jews in Nazi era - UGA Today
Wroclaw University in southwest Poland has reinstated academic degrees of German Jews nearly 80 years after Nazis revoked their titles, according to The
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Christine Kexel Chabot @kexelchabot.bsky.social · 09/03/2025
Very excited that Rejecting the Unitary Executive is forthcoming in the Utah Law Review (Fall 2025)! papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.... Here’s a 🧵outlining key arguments in the paper:
papers.ssrn.com
Rejecting the Unitary Executive
<p>Critics have dismissed originalism as an empty methodology. They claim it is incapable of resolving our most important constitutional disputes, including the
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Anya Bernstein @anyabernstein.bsky.social · 02/03/2025
Ah yes the elusive TOE (theory of everything), which is necessarily also wrong.
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Anya Bernstein @anyabernstein.bsky.social · 02/03/2025
I think what Evan is trying to foment is a response and ridicule that would dissuade others from taking that position in the first place. I’m on board with that project even though obviously people who like to build out bad theories might not be enthusiastic.
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Anya Bernstein @anyabernstein.bsky.social · 02/03/2025
Over under theorized!
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Anya Bernstein @anyabernstein.bsky.social · 02/03/2025
I think we’re both right!
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Anya Bernstein @anyabernstein.bsky.social · 02/03/2025
Basically this phrase expresses a bad theory of theories.
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Anya Bernstein @anyabernstein.bsky.social · 02/03/2025
I’m snarkily agreeing with Evan though that this is now actually how theorizing works. It doesn’t actually take a better theory to see that some theory is wrong. Eg, if your empirical claims don’t fit the empirical data, we don’t need to wait for another theory to see that and reject those claims.
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Anya Bernstein @anyabernstein.bsky.social · 02/03/2025
Or I guess you could say: If your theory just doesn’t work, it kind of beats itself. (Eg doesn’t have the empirical foundations you ground it on, doesn’t have the normative payoff you claim…)
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Fabrice aka Curious Crocodile @curiouscrocodile.bsky.social · 28/02/2025
#SlavaUkraini
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Anya Bernstein @anyabernstein.bsky.social · 10/02/2025
Well when you put that way...
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Julian Davis Mortenson @jdmortenson.bsky.social · 10/02/2025
Kate Andrias, “Separation of Wealth” (2015) 🔥 🔥 🔥 scholarship.law.upenn.edu/jcl/vol18/is...
scholarship.law.upenn.edu
Separations of Wealth: Inequality and the Erosion of Checks and Balances
By Kate Andrias, Published on 01/01/15
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Anya Bernstein @anyabernstein.bsky.social · 10/02/2025
This is a really nice point. If rules are being rewritten, who's to say who can be a writer?
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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 07/02/2025
Every headline that does not say “illegal” or “unconstitutional” is a failure to convey to the public the stakes of what is going on.
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Anya Bernstein @anyabernstein.bsky.social · 26/12/2024
Just talking about this at dinner! The ultimate. We happened upon the "outtakes" one year; a worthy follow-up for when you can't get enough.
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Anya Bernstein @anyabernstein.bsky.social · 20/12/2024
If you're looking for a page turner for the 10-and-up set, this is some narrative nonfiction that will grip your kid through the gift overwhelm. www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/714730...
penguinrandomhouse.com
The Mona Lisa Vanishes by Nicholas Day: 9780593643846 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books
A “witty thriller” (The New York Times) for middle-grade readers about how the Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre, how the robbery made the portrait the most famous artwork in the...
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Anya Bernstein @anyabernstein.bsky.social · 20/12/2024
When I started clerking, I found a list on my office bulletin board with asylum grant rates by IJ in our circuit. They ranged from 2% to 98%.
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Anya Bernstein @anyabernstein.bsky.social · 20/12/2024
This looks really important & interesting. Also sounds like herculean effort -- congrats!
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Anya Bernstein @anyabernstein.bsky.social · 19/12/2024
Perhaps you (or some youngish human you know) would enjoy this Nothing of beauty. www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/737998...
penguinrandomhouse.com
Nothing by Nicholas Day: 9780823454099 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books
What does nothing sound like? An offbeat history of John Cage’s 4’33”, a musical composition of blank bars, illustrated by Caldecott Medalist Chris Raschka. One night in 1952, master...
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Rachel Barkow @rachelbarkow.bsky.social · 09/12/2024
I'm happy to announce my new book on the Supreme Court's role in fostering mass incarceration will go on sale March 4. I hope you'll check it out! You can preorder here: www.amazon.com/gp/product/0... And read more details here: www.hup.harvard.edu/books/978067...
hup.harvard.edu
Justice Abandoned — Harvard University Press
An influential legal scholar argues that the Supreme Court played a pivotal role in the rise of mass incarceration in America.With less than 5 percent of the world’s population and almost a quarter of...
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Anya Bernstein @anyabernstein.bsky.social · 08/12/2024
“Shelve =\= endorse” Even though I guess you are, in a literal sense, platforming him. To the extent that a shelf is a platform.
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Anya Bernstein @anyabernstein.bsky.social · 03/12/2024
Yes, and you knew who your friends were — you depended on each other both materially and ideologically.
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Anya Bernstein @anyabernstein.bsky.social · 03/12/2024
Yes I remember going to Moscow in 1992 and riding a city bus next to a middle aged/elderly woman who was holding a picture of Stalin in the style of a Greek Orthodox icon. 1992! She had clearly experienced the Stalin years. And yet.
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Anya Bernstein @anyabernstein.bsky.social · 03/12/2024
yes exactly. And the key (to me) is that these desires are often held simultaneously by the very same person. Many of us want a little collective effervescence along with our freedoms and powers. That research made me realize how much democracy needs legitimation and nourshment -- even to supporters
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Anya Bernstein @anyabernstein.bsky.social · 02/12/2024
When I was doing research in newly democratized Taiwan, even activists would sometimes tell me “Taiwan is too democratic.” By which they meant they missed the sense of shared communal purpose and value that martial law instilled. Even if they didn’t miss the oppression that went along with it.
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Anya Bernstein @anyabernstein.bsky.social · 27/11/2024
Honestly hadn’t thought it through enough to realize that Prints was the nail in that coffin but of course it is. What a way to run a country.
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Anya Bernstein @anyabernstein.bsky.social · 27/11/2024
Federalism! It’s the best.
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Anya Bernstein @anyabernstein.bsky.social · 25/11/2024
Totally! I try to remind students that there's always someone on the other side waiting to argue against them. What would that person say?
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