Alyse Bertenthal

Alyse Bertenthal joined the Wake Forest Law faculty in 2020. Her research focuses on the relationship between law and culture. Within this broad frame, her projects encompass a number of topics including how cultural, legal, and scientific practices affect the construction and implementation of environmental law; the intersection of law and language; and how legal expertise is generated and performed. Although spanning several different subject areas, these projects share in common : (1) a focus on the techniques and practices that generate law and its applications and influences; and (2) a commitment to the use of interdisciplinary research methods for empirical investigation of socio-legal phenomena.

Bertenthal's research has been supported grants and fellowships from the National Science Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Council of Learned Societies, and the John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation. Her work is forthcoming or has appeared in law reviews and peer-reviewed publications, including Annual Review of Law & Social Science, Law & Literature, Law & Policy, Law & Social Inquiry, Theoretical Criminology, Wisconsin Law Review, University of Chicago Law Review, and Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities.

Bertenthal attended University of Chicago Law School and Yale University. She received a Ph.D. in the interdisciplinary field of Criminology, Law and Society from University of California, Irvine, where she was awarded the Michelle Smith-Pontell Award for Outstanding Accomplishments in Graduate Study and the Gil Geis Award for Excellence in Research. After graduating law school, she clerked for Judge Richard A. Paez on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and Judge A. Howard Matz on the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California. She also worked as an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union Criminal Law Reform Project and as a litigation associate at Keker & Van Nest in San Francisco.