Jill C. Anderson

Professor of Law

Expertise

Law and Linguistics, Antidiscrimination Law, Insurance Law

Biography

Jill Anderson joined the UConn Law faculty on a permanent basis in 2010 after a two-year appointment as a visiting professor. Before coming to UConn she taught for three years at Western New England School of Law, following her work as a Skadden Fellow and staff attorney at Western Massachusetts Legal Services, where she represented low-income disabled individuals challenging discriminatory housing policies and insurance practices.

Professor Anderson is a graduate of Columbia Law School, where she was a Lowenstein Public Interest Fellow and earned James Kent Scholar honors. She was studying theoretical linguistics in graduate programs at Stanford University and the University of Copenhagen before an abiding interest in social justice led her to law. Prior to attending Columbia, she spent four years developing diversity training and testing projects at a law firm that monitored consent decrees in the aftermath of civil rights litigation.

Professor Anderson is known for her innovative and consequential scholarship on language and law. Her expertise in linguistics informs her articles on statutory interpretation, which have appeared in the Yale Law Journal and Harvard Law Review, and which reach substantive areas as diverse as disability discrimination, white collar crime, intellectual property, and genocide law. She has presented her work at numerous scholarly events and regularly shares its practical payoff by speaking before judicial and practitioner conferences. Professor Anderson teaches in the areas of insurance, contract, legal interpretation, and law and cognition. She views thoughtful engagement with her students as the best way to explore our legal culture of cognition: what does and should count as “good thinking” in law?