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 critically interrogates dominant understandings and models of administration, membership, legal and political contestation, and rule of law. Her current projects explore the relationship between law and violence in administration; sociologically informed models for understanding the administrative state and public law; and alternative ways to regulate migration and political membership. She has a particular interest in expanding the evidence and perspectives legal scholarship uses to articulate high-level theoretical concepts like legitimacy and membership and to identify the normative goals of regulation. Accordingly, her scholarship incorporates her own qualitative research and draws on other scholars’ qualitative work. Her articles have been published or are forthcoming in the California Law Review, Yale Law Journal, Texas Law Review, Maryland Law Review, and Texas International Law Journal.
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.
