Amy J. Cohen is the inaugural holder of the Robert J. Reinstein Chair in law. Amy’s research focuses on two areas of sociolegal scholarship—alternative dispute resolution and informal justice, including among people building alternatives to the criminal legal system, and law and economic development, including the law and political economy of agriculture and food. Before joining Temple, she was the John C. Elam/Vorys Sater Professor of Law at The Ohio State University and Professor of Law at UNSW Sydney in the School of Law, Society, and Criminology, where she remains an honorary professor. Before joining Ohio State, she clerked on the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit.
Amy has taught a range of classes including property law, family law, mediation, negotiation, international dispute resolution, law and development, food law, and experimentalist legal theory. She has held visiting professorships at Harvard Law School, Osgoode Hall Law School, the University of Turin Faculty of Law, and the West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences. She has also held fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, the American Institute of Indian Studies at the University of Chicago, the Fulbright Program, and the Collegio Carlo Alberto. She used several of these fellowships to develop a multi-year project on smallholder farmers and economic justice in India.
Amy has published widely in law reviews such as the University of Chicago Law Review, Texas Law Review and Minnesota Law Review and in peer reviews such as Law & Social Inquiry, Regulation & Governance, and PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review. Amy’s current major theoretical project, with several colleagues, surfaces an emergent movement in law that examines how people use the language, legitimacy, and forms of law to imagine and enact alternative social and economic relations—without waiting for the prior transformation of state or institutional power. Some recent or forthcoming publications in this research stream include Prefigurative Legality (with Bronwen Morgan); Diverse Legalities: Towards a Legal Theory for a Postcapitalist Political Economy (with Stephen Healy); Prefigurative Neoliberalism: A Provisional Analysis of the Global Sovereign Citizen Movement (with Ilana Gershon); Reflecting on/for Better Worlds (with Ilana Gershon); Pedagogies in the Meantime: Reflections on ADR and Restorative Justice in U.S. and Canadian Legal Education (with Daniel Del Gobbo); and Radical Restorative Justice: Reflections on Conflict, Trauma, and Hope in Chicagoland Schools (with Uma Blanchard).
Amy holds a BA, summa cum laude, from Rutgers University and a JD, magna cum laude, from Harvard Law School. You can find lots of her writing posted on SSRN.