Emily Chertoff
About me
I am a scholar of migration and administrative law and an Associate Professor of Law at Georgetown.
My work asks what the real-world behavior of state institutions, like immigration agencies and agencies that use physical force, can tell us about prevailing models and big concepts in my fields. On the migration side, I study immigration control and alternative ways to regulate migration. Currently, I am researching the relationship between legal regulation of asylum, state-building, and national identity over time and across different societies. On the administrative law side, I study the relationship between state violence and administration and the legal regulation of enforcement.
Before joining the academy, I was an attorney. I did immigration work across many different settings, often working directly with asylum seekers and immigrants, including many who were detained. My work included COVID-19 emergency habeas litigation and Ninth Circuit appellate practice. Between 2020 and 2022, the state-level advocacy organization I directed successfully campaigned for and worked to establish the United States’ second state-funded child immigrant defense program.
From 2022-2024, I was an Academic Fellow at Columbia Law School. My scholarship is published or forthcoming in the California Law Review, Yale Law Journal, Texas Law Review, Maryland Law Review, and Texas International Law Journal.
I received my J.D. from Yale Law School in 2017, where I was an editor of the Yale Law Journal and the Yale Journal of International Law.
Emily Chertoff 