Elizabeth Anker

Elizabeth S. Anker is a Professor of Law, as well as Professor in the Department of Literatures in English at Cornell University. She has published and taught in the areas of human rights and humanitarianism, comparative constitutional law, law and literature, contract law, postcolonial studies, animal rights, immigration law, and legal and political theory.

Her most recent book, On Paradox: The Claims of Theory (Duke 2022), contends that a logic of paradox has governed left intellectual life since the rise of critical theory. It shows how an investment in paradox has been central to debates about social justice and ethics; the value of the humanities; legal constructs like rights; and more. Her first book, Fictions of Dignity: Embodying Human Rights in World Literature (Cornell 2012), examines the status of human dignity and bodily integrity in liberal human rights discourses and norms, through case studies involving the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, women’s freedoms in Egypt, and Indian constitutionalism. Anker’s recent publications also include the law review article "Left-Crit Theory Goes to Washington: The Anti-Liberal Ideology of the Roberts Court"(Penn Journal of Constitutional Law), which examines how the Roberts Court’s emerging jurisprudence draws from an argumentative toolkit ordinarily associated with leftist critique. She has published two co-edited collections. First, Critique and Postcritique (with Rita Felski) considers the need to rethink the dominance of negative critique within literary and critical theory (Duke 2017). Second, New Directions in Law and Literature (with Bernadette Meyler) assesses recent developments in interdisciplinary scholarship on law and literature (Oxford 2017). She has also co-edited special issues of The University of Colorado Law Review on "The Stakes for Critical Theory" and of Diacritics on "The Novel and the Lyric."

Anker is currently completing two books. The first is a trade book (under contract with Crown) that charts the sweeping changes that revolutionized the American university system over the past sixty years, beginning with the late 1960s emergence of the theory era in literary studies to the current backlash against the many social and political advances associated with critical theory. It investigates how the New Right’s agenda (in politics, law, and culture) is paradoxically enabled by a series of tactics, critiques, and ideas borrowed from leftist theory. Second, Our Constitutional Metaphors: Law, Culture, and the Management of Crisis conducts a comparative study of the diverse symbolism that has shaped different constitutional cultures across multiple national contexts.

Anker holds a J.D. from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. Before pursuing her Ph.D., she practiced for two years in the banking and structured finance group of the Chicago and New York offices of Sidley Austin LLP. She has been a fellow at the Cornell Society for the Humanities and the Stanford Humanities Center. During the 2014-15 academic year, she was the primary organizer of a Mellon Sawyer Seminar Grant on "Political Will." She is also founding Editor of the book series Corpus Juris: The Humanities in Politics and Law (with Cornell University Press).