Emily R. Chertoff studies the interactions between law, other social institutions, state agents, and communities, with a focus on migration control and other physically coercive forms of regulation. She is an Associate Professor of Law.

Her work applies a sociolegal lens to interrogate dominant models of administration, membership, and rule of law. It combines theory, interview-based studies, and other qualitative research methodologies to describe and explain transformations in law enforcement by the U.S. state, and how they affect both the people who enforce the law and the people who are subject to it. Her scholarly articles have been published in the New York University Law Review, California Law Review, Yale Law Journal, and Texas Law Review. She regularly comments on immigration and administrative enforcement in the national and international media, including the Washington Post, NPR, and the BBC.

Before joining the academy, she served as the first Executive Director of the New Jersey Consortium for Immigrant Children, an advocacy coalition that won state-funded legal services for immigrant youth. She also was a Staff Attorney and Yale Public Interest Fellow at Immigrant Defenders Law Center, where she helped build an impact litigation and appellate advocacy practice. Her work included emergency COVID-19 habeas practice, Ninth Circuit litigation, and direct representation of detained people.

She joined the Georgetown faculty in 2024. From 2022 to 2024, she was an Academic Fellow at Columbia Law School. She holds a JD from Yale Law School, where she won the Jerome Sayles Hess Prize for best student in the area of international law, and a BA from Harvard University. She speaks English and Spanish.