Faculty Profile (Back to Menu)
Vera Bergelson
Professor of Law and Robert E. Knowlton Scholar
Professor Bergelson earned her diploma in Slavic languages and literatures with distinction from Moscow State University and her Ph.D. in philology from the Institute of Slavic and Balkan Studies in Moscow, Russia. She earned her J.D. cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania Law School, where she was on the Law Review and was named to the Order of the Coif.
Professor Bergelson has been a lecturer at Moscow State University, the Polish Cultural Center, and the Literary Institute in Moscow. Before joining the Rutgers faculty in 2001, she was an associate with Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton in New York for six years. She is fluent in Russian and Polish and has a reading proficiency in Bulgarian, Belorussian, and Ukranian.
Professor Bergelson’s book Victims’ Rights and Victims’ Wrongs: A Theory of Comparative Criminal Liability was published in August 2009 by Stanford University Press. Works in progress are “Victimless Crimes” in Wiley-Blackwell’s International Encyclopedia of Ethics (2010) and “Strict Liability and Affirmative Defenses.” Her recent articles include “The Case of Weak Will and Wayward Desire” in Criminal Law and Philosophy (2009); “Provocation: Not Just a Partial Excuse” in Criminal Law Conversations (Oxford University Press, 2009); “Consent to Harm” in the Pace Law Review and also in The Ethics of Consent Theory and Practice (Alan Wertheimer & Franklin G. Miller, eds., forthcoming, Oxford University Press, 2009); “Autonomy, Dignity, and Consent to Harm” in the Rutgers Law Review (2008); “The Right to Be Hurt: Testing the Boundaries of Consent” in the George Washington Law Review (2007); and “Rights, Wrongs, and Comparative Justifications” in the Cardozo Law Review (2007). Her forum paper “Victims and Perpetrators: An Argument for Comparative Liability in Criminal Law” and a reply to commentators entitled “Conditional Rights and Comparative Wrongs: More on the Theory and Application of Comparative Criminal Liability” were published in 2005 in the Buffalo Criminal Law Review Review.